


No Happily Ever Afters

by Anthemyst



Series: Generations Past and Future [4]
Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: F/M, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sequel, but it'll lighten up by the end, probably pretty heavy on the angst for a few chapters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-07
Updated: 2016-12-10
Packaged: 2018-08-29 16:07:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 36,233
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8496568
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anthemyst/pseuds/Anthemyst
Summary: Sequel to Your Princess is in Another Castle.After four long, horrible years, Mrs. Agreste has finally been found. The heroes rescued the damsel, they returned home triumphant, and they all lived happily ever after.Right?





	1. The Fall of Hawkmoth

**Author's Note:**

> This is a very direct sequel to [Your Princess is in Another Castle](http://archiveofourown.org/works/8151359/chapters/18681077), so you will probably be pretty lost if you don't read that first. And it's the fifth in a series of fics all set in the same universe, so a lot of the emotional impact will be lost if you don't read from the beginning. If you're impatient, I'd suggest at least starting with [Just Before Losing Everything](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7601503/chapters/17299387). Thanks for reading!

Three generations of superheroes were seated around a round table. At the center of it was a small device, a hollow wooden lidless box with small crystals slowly hovering in a circle inside, glowing and humming slightly. All five of those present looked at it, frowning, deep in thought. Finally, the youngest of them spoke.

“I think we should leave it on,” Marinette said. Across the table, Gabriel Agreste raised an eyebrow but said nothing.

“Why?” Fu, the oldest of them by over a century, asked.

“It’s-look, I hate that it’s on. I can feel it every second of the day, no matter where I am in the city, and it makes my skin-” she cut herself off with a shudder. “And I want to be Ladybug so much, I really do, but giving that up to prevent any more akumas, it’s worth it, don’t you think?”

“Perhaps,” Fu said, but he sighed and looked at the box with a kind of gentle sorrow that broke Marinette’s heart. “This device goes against everything I've dedicated my entire life to,” he said slowly.

“This will protect people,” Adrien pointed out. “Isn’t _that_ what you’ve dedicated your life to?”

Instead of answering, Fu turned to his right. “Paon?”

“Shut it off,” Gabriel answered immediately. Marinette and Adrien gaped at him.

“It was _your_ idea in the first place!” Adrien said, stunned. “You basically invented it!”

“I did,” his father agreed.

“You don’t even want to _be_ a superhero anymore,” Marinette added, before realizing that this might be a rude thing to say. However, Gabriel simply nodded.

“I don’t,” he said. “However…” He leaned back, placing the tips of his fingers together, as he considered his next words carefully. “I want to end the nightmare that Paris has been living in for the past year. Once I thought this device was the best way to do that, but it isn’t. Hawkmoth,” Gabriel, who was always so detached, was unable to say the villain’s name without a touch of venom, “is… creative. Especially when it comes to magical obstacles. He never should have been able to find the Butterfly Miraculous in the first place, and yet somehow, without any magic of his own, he managed to do it in only three years. It is only a matter of time before he finds some way around this obstacle, and there will be no predicting when exactly he does. Perhaps it won’t be until after we’ve grown complacent. It would be better to shut it off now, to allow Hawkmoth to transform again-and to be ready. Now that there are four of us, all working together, the next time he attacks we can be ready to bring the fight to him and finish this once and for all.”

Fu nodded thoughtfully, then turned to the final person gathered, the one who hadn't spoken yet, the one who had the most personal stake in what they were discussing. “Adele?”

“I…” she took a shaky breath. “I've been back for two days. The press release was four days ago. He _must_ know I'm alive by now. Maybe… maybe he’ll stop, maybe he’ll give it back.”

Nobody said anything to contradict her, or made any kind of face or dismissive noise, but Adele was an empath. She knew not a single one of them believed it could possibly be that easy.

Gabriel placed a hand over Adele’s. “Perhaps,” he said, not unkindly, “but if he's going to do that, he’ll do it whether the device is on or not. It doesn't affect the decision the five of us need to make today. We have to make this decision assuming he won’t.”

Adele sighed and nodded. “In that case, shut it off. It's not enough to stop the akumas. We need to get my… the Miraculous away from him. We need to rescue Nooroo, and the people of Paris need the peace of mind that would come with knowing the Miraculous is back in safe hands.”

Fu nodded, then turned back to Adrien and Marinette. “I would prefer that the decision be unanimous,” he said.

The two heroes exchanged a glance, and then Marinette looked at Fu. “You’re _sure_ that you’ll be able to find him if he attacks again?” she asked.

“Not alone,” Fu explained, “but I will be able to get a general sense of where the akuma originated. It should be specific enough that Paon can teleport you all to wherever he is hiding.”

“Well…” Marinette trailed off, then looked back at Adrien. “One more akuma,” she said.

“Yeah.” Adrien paused for a moment. “I don’t like putting others at risk, but Paris has survived more attacks than I can count by now. It can handle one more. It’s… it’s probably worth it.”

“If it means an end to this,” Marinette added.

“It will be,” Adrien promised her. She nodded.

“Very well,” Fu said. He reached over and gently plucked one of the hovering crystals from the box. The other six immediately dimmed and fell to the bottom. Marinette and Adrien both sighed in relief, and even Gabriel looked slightly less uncomfortable.

“I feel like I can breath again,” Marinette said.

“Me, too,” Adrien agreed, but he frowned slightly. “If it was that obvious to us, it was obvious to him, too. He must know it’s off now.”

Gabriel stood. “We’ll be ready,” he said. He started towards the door, and Adrien and Marinette got up and followed. He was just about to open it when he noticed his wife was still seated. “Adele?”

Adele shook her head, snapping herself out of her slight daze. “Sorry, just thinking,” she said. She looked at the device, now lying powerless in front of her, for another moment before getting up. No longer being a Miraculous holder herself, she hadn’t felt uncomfortable when it was powered up, and now that it was off she didn’t feel the same sense of relief that the others had.

The device that blocked Miraculous transformations had been a pause button, and though Adele knew it couldn’t have stayed on forever, it had been something of a comfort. It had been delaying the confrontation between her brother and the rest of her family, the confrontation every superhero in Paris seemed to think was inevitable, the confrontation that Adele desperately wanted to believe would never happen.

The last four years had greatly numbed Adele’s capacity for hope, but it wasn’t entirely gone. With every passing day that she was back in the world she could feel it healing itself, growing, reaching. Despite everything she’d heard, everything she’d read, everything the others felt, Adele truly believed there was a chance that her return would be enough, that Hawkmoth would learn of it and somehow become her brother again.

 

* * *

 

The next akuma attack was five days later.

Adrien found out on his way home from school. About five blocks from the mansion, the limo was abruptly cut off by a stampede of stray cats, each one the size of a large panther. The Gorilla hit the brakes abruptly, then checked in the rear-view mirror to make sure Adrien was all right. Once the way was clear, he started for the mansion at top speed.

Sighing, Adrien pulled out his phone and checked the online akuma feed. It had been dead for almost two weeks, but now it was reporting on the akumatization of a local animal rights activist, a shelter volunteer who had evidently become fed up with the way Paris neglected its stray population.

“At least this one makes more sense than the pigeons,” Adrien muttered to himself, sending a quick text to Marinette to meet them at Fu’s. Once the car had pulled to a stop in front of the mansion steps, Adrien jumped out and ran up them two at a time, burst through the front door, and ran for his father’s office. Both his parents were waiting for him. His mother was pacing somewhat anxiously, but she looked up and relaxed slightly when Adrien entered.

“Good,” Gabriel said. “You’re here. It’s time to end this.” Adrien nodded and closed the door firmly behind him, then walked over. Gabriel quickly transformed, then placed a hand on his son’s shoulder. Before he could vanish, however, his wife grabbed his other hand. He turned to look at her, eyebrows raised.

“You should wait here,” Paon said to her. “It’s safer.”

“If you try to leave me behind,” Adele replied steadily, “I’ll just have to travel to Fu’s myself. Through the city. Alone. During an akuma attack.”

Paon rolled his eyes, but a second later all three of them were gone.

 

* * *

 

“Here,” Fu said, pointing to an area circled in red on a map of Paris. Paon frowned.

“It’s a wider radius than I’d like,” he said.

“If you can’t find him, return at once. Ladybug and Chat Noir can deal with the akuma directly while the three of us come up with a new plan. But don’t try assuming you’ll fail-it’s well within your abilities.” After a moment, Paon nodded. He placed a firm hand on each of the waiting superheroes’ shoulders, then took a deep breath and let it out slowly. A moment later, all three were gone.

Adele counted to twenty in her head, then crossed the room to the small table they’d sat at a week earlier. “I guess they found him,” she said.

“So it would seem,” Fu replied. “Tea?” Adele nodded, and Fu left the room. He returned about ten minutes later and handed Adele a hot cup. She took it, but simply held it in both hands without drinking. “I have a small television set,” Fu told her. “Would you like to watch the coverage?”

“No,” Adele said, not looking at him. Nodding, Fu sat down across from her, and the two waited in silence, Adele lost in thought.

“Five days is a long time to go without an akuma attack.”

Adele looked up. “Pardon?”

“They were almost every other day, near the end,” Fu continued. “Perhaps he was resisting, this time.”

“Oh,” Adele said. She finally took a sip of tea as she considered this. “Are… Jonathan’s akumas, are they always so… _thematic_?”

“Yes.”

“Oh.” Adele ran a finger around the rim of her cup idly. “I suppose I should know that. I tried looking up past attacks, but there were so many, and after a few I just couldn’t stand to…” she sighed. “I suppose that’s weak, that I owe it to the people akumatized to at least read the accounts of what happened to them.”

“Why?” Fu asked. He calmly took a sip of his tea as Adele blinked, unable to answer. “There’s no reason to punish yourself,” he added, when it was clear she wasn’t going to respond.

“I’m not-” Adele was unable to finish the sentence. Fu didn’t comment on this, which she appreciated.

Before either of them could say anything more on the subject, an extremely exhausted looking Paon suddenly appeared alongside Adrien. Not Chat Noir-Adrien. Adele sprang up from her chair as Paon grabbed his son by both shoulders and looked him in the eye. “Are you alright?” he demanded.

“I’m fine,” Adrien insisted, “but you have to get back there, Ladybug’s still-”

“She’ll be fine,” Paon insisted. “I have to make sure you’re-”

“No, you have to get back there now,” Adrien said frantically, “she’s by herself, we’re separated again, if I can’t-Dad, _please_.” His voice broke on the last word. His father was clearly caught off-guard by the informal address, although Adrien didn’t seem to realize he’d said it. Paon nodded, and disappeared without another word. Adrien immediately looked inside the pocket of his shirt. “Can we turn back?” he asked, and the kwami within flew up to Adrien’s eye level.

“Sorry,” Plagg said, “not without a recharge.” Adrien turned to Fu.

“Do you have anything he can eat?” he asked. “I have to get back there.”

Fu rose from the table. “I’ll see what I can find,” he said. He exited, Plagg following close behind. Adrien sighed and sat down at the table. His mother joined him.

“Adrien, what on earth happened?” Adele asked, her voice filled with worry.

“We needed a Cataclysm,” he explained. “There were these… I don’t know, trap spell things.”

Adele groaned. “Wards,” she muttered. “Of course he warded his base, why didn’t we think of that?”

“And I lost track of my timer,” Adrien continued. His mother’s eyes widened in horror.

“He saw you?” she asked in a whisper.

“Yeah,” Adrien said, not sounding too concerned. “It was dumb. Anyway, Father noticed and got me out fast.”

“Did he recognize you?”

“Well, he looked pretty stunned, and he stopped attacking me,” Adrien said, “so I guess so.”

“Well. That’s… not nothing, I suppose.” Adele said. Adrien shrugged.

“He kept attacking Ladybug,” he said darkly. “And Father, who he definitely recognized right away.”

Adele sighed. “Yes, he would.”

Adrien tapped his foot impatiently, looking towards the door that led to Fu’s small kitchenette. “How much longer-” Before he could finish the question, Paon and Ladybug reappeared, both quite disheveled. Ladybug strode decisively to the table and slammed something down on it with all her might. She breathed the largest sigh of relief Adele had ever heard.

“Got it,” she said. She looked at Adrien. “Are you okay?”

“Are _you_ okay?” Ladybug nodded.

“Yeah, fine, it went fine once we knew how to deal with his defenses. He got away, though, he’d set up some emergency getaway thing. But he’s just a regular guy now, wherever he is, not a Miraculous holder anymore.”

“That is not entirely the case,” Fu said, reappearing in the doorway and walking towards them. Ladybug’s jaw dropped.

“This isn’t _over_?” she asked, sounding horrified.

“Your part is,” Fu promised her. “Well, except for the final akuma victim that still needs to be saved. The Miraculous, however, is technically still bound to Hawkmoth. He didn’t surrender it willingly. See, it is still camouflaged to him. I’ll need to sever the link. It shouldn’t take too long.” He walked towards an ornate cabinet in a far corner of the room and started rummaging through it, pulling things out.

Ladybug looked at Paon. “One more trip, then,” she said.

“No,” Adrien insisted, “wait for me, I’ll be ready in-”

“No, we should finish this as soon as possible,” Ladybug said. “Your dad and I can handle it.” She looked back at Paon. “We still want to keep your involvement a secret,” she reminded him, “so stay out of sight.”

“Don’t worry,” Paon said dryly, “that’s one of my specialties.” He put a hand on her shoulder again, and they were gone. Adrien groaned in frustration.

“Again?” he asked. “Why does this keep happening?”

“I’m sure she’ll be fine, darling,” Adele said. She picked up the Miraculous and looked at it closely. It was so different from how it had been when it was camouflaged to her, it was almost hard to believe it was the same item. Instead of an understated wire-frame brooch, this was an ornate purple one. Adele noticed the hinges on the side, then pried it open with a fingernail. A second later she’d quickly snapped it shut again, her expression pained, and dropped the Miraculous back on the table.

Fu returned with a small bowl and an assortment of ingredients. He placed them inside the bowl, pulled out a pack of matches, and set them on fire. He then picked up the Miraculous, dropped it in the center of the flames, and started chanting under his breath.

He was still chanting when Ladybug and Paon returned. Ladybug quickly confirmed that the final akuma victim had been stopped, that Paon had not been seen, and that she had confidently announced to the gathered reporters that Hawkmoth’s Miraculous had finally been taken from him. While she did so, Gabriel dropped his transformation and crossed to the other side of the room. He spoke with his kwami in a low voice, and the others didn’t bother trying to hear the conversation. Marinette dropped her transformation as well and sat beside Adrien, the three of them watching Fu work silently.

After another five minutes, there was a sudden shock pulse that pushed them all back a few feet before they knew what had hit them. When they looked back, the flames had died and the uncamouflaged Butterfly Miraculous sat atop the ashes. Adele sighed in relief.

“It’s finally done, then?” she asked. Fu nodded, then looked at her.

“Adele,” he said gently, “I’m afraid I cannot return it to you.”

Adele blinked. She hadn’t quite been allowing herself to consider whether she wanted it back or not, so it was something of a shock for the decision to be made for her.

“Not through any failing of your own,” Fu continued. “However… the damage done to the energy of this Miraculous, through repeated akumatizations, over and over with no cleansing ritual between them, it is extensive. The Butterfly Miraculous needs time to heal.”

Adele nodded. “How long?” she asked. Fu looked down at it.

“I should think about ten years,” he said, as though this was not very long at all. “After that, we can revisit-”

“I’m not going to want to start being a superhero again after ten years,” Adele interrupted.

“No,” Fu agreed, “I suppose not.”

Adele felt a hand on her shoulder, and looked up to see her husband had joined them. “Rajji and I have just discussed it,” he said, “and I believe the time has come for me to return mine as well.”

“Are you sure?” Adele asked. “You don’t have to-”

“Adele,” Gabriel interrupted, “I cannot be a hero without you.” He sat down next to her, removing the tie clip, and looked at it thoughtfully. “Over the past two weeks, I have had the opportunity to fix all the lingering mistakes of my shaky legacy as Paon,” he said. “I have helped rescue you, and I have helped defeat Hawkmoth. It’s a more fitting end to my career than I’d hoped for.”

Adele looked at Rajji, who was taking this more philosophically than Adele would have expected. “Rajji, are you-”

“Oh!” Rajji flew forward and hugged Adele’s cheek. “I’m so happy you’re back!” she said, crying happily. “I never thought-Oh, take care of yourself!” Adele nodded, and Rajji flew over to Adrien. “I can’t believe I got to see you become a hero! And you’re so _good_ at it!” She turned to Marinette. “And you, too-you two are so good for eachother!” Before they could respond, she’d hugged them both and flown back to Gabriel.

“Thank you, Rajji,” Gabriel said simply. “It has been… nothing less than the experience of a lifetime.” She grinned, and Gabriel held the clip over the table. “Ready?”

Rajji nodded. “Goodbye, Gabriel,” she said cheerfully. Gabriel placed the clip down, there was a flash of light, and Rajji was gone.

Master Fu reached over to pick up the Peacock Miraculous, then took the Butterfly up as well, and started to turn away from the table. Adele touched his arm. “Wait,” she said. “Can I…” she hesitated. “Can I say goodbye to Nooroo, too?”

Fu turned back to her. “It’s very important that he not be activated,” he said, and Adele’s face fell, “but he will be able to hear you if you speak to him.” Fu placed the Butterfly Miraculous on the table gently. “Be careful.”

Adele nodded. Bracing herself mentally so she didn’t accidentally re-accept the Miraculous and activate it, she picked it up gently and held it close to her face. “Nooroo,” she whispered as quietly as she could, “I’m,” she was crying immediately, “I’m so, so sorry. I hope you can forgive me for allowing all of this to happen. And I hope that, in my lifetime, we meet again.” She kissed the center of the Butterfly, then placed it back down on the table, sighing heavily.

It was over.


	2. Readjusting

A week later, Adrien came downstairs before school one morning to find his father already eating, seated at the table and reading the paper. This was not unusual, although only recently so. Before his wife’s return, Gabriel was rarely found eating at all, and if so it was usually in his office in the middle of working, never sitting at a dining table. But now he made some effort to eat with his family again, so Adrien was only surprised that his mother, an early riser, was not already downstairs as well.

And then he got close enough to see his father’s face, and he gasped.

“Good morning, Adrien,” Gabriel said, as though nothing were unusual.

“What _happened_?”

“Absolutely nothing of note. There’s really no call to be quite so dramatic.”

“You have a black eye!”

“Well,” Gabriel calmly flipped to the next page of the newspaper, “it’s hardly my first.” When his son continued to stand there, gaping, Gabriel sighed in irritation and finally looked up at him. “Your mother had a nightmare,” he said by way of explanation. “So I would consider it a personal favor if you could get your overly emotional reaction out of your system before she comes down here and picks up on it.”

Adrien blinked. “Oh,” he said. He sat down and slowly began grabbing the food their chef had prepared, trying not to think about anything. It had never occurred to him that his emotions might be a problem for his mother. For the first time he wondered if that was partly why she’d fallen for his father, who seemed to have so few of them.

About ten minutes later, Adele arrived. She took two steps into the kitchen and groaned. “Oh, God,” she said, sounding equal parts horrified and embarrassed, “that looks so much worse in the light of day.”

“It’s fine,” Gabriel insisted.

“No, it isn’t. I can’t believe I… maybe I should sleep in one of the other rooms. Just until we’re sure this won’t happen again.”

“Don’t be absurd.”

“It’s not _absurd_ , Gabriel, it’s a sensible precaution. I can’t be punching you in the face every other night.”

Gabriel closed his newspaper and looked up at his wife, one eyebrow raised. “Adele,” he said firmly, “I slept alone for four years. Do not ask me to do it ever again. I assure you, it would be far more painful than the occasional black eye.”

For a moment, Adele was speechless. “Oh,” she finally said. “Well… all right, if you insist.”

“I do.” Gabriel went back to reading his paper, and Adele moved to sit across from her son at the table, quickly kissing the top of her husband’s head as she walked by him.

“So, Adrien,” Adele said, as she started loading her plate with various foods, “how’s school going?” Adrien had missed the first week of school, having been away rescuing his mother, so he’d been doing extra schoolwork since getting back.

“Great,” Adrien said, after swallowing a mouthful of toast, “I’m basically caught up in every subject.”

“Excellent,” his father said, finally putting the paper aside. “You’ll be able to return to your normal schedule, then.” Adrien nodded. “In that case, there’s a photo shoot tomorrow for our new activewear line, I’ll have Nathalie-”

“Wait,” Adele interrupted, looking up suddenly. She squinted at her son, then looked at her husband. “Adrien’s modeling now?”

“Of course he is,” Gabriel replied. “Look at him.”

Adele took a breath and let it out. “I’m not impugning our son’s looks, Gabriel,” she said slowly, “I’m-Adrien, do you _like_ modeling?”

“Um. Yeah, sure,” Adrien said, already seeing and dreading where this was going.

Adele raised an eyebrow and looked back at her husband. “Uh huh. He’s done modeling.”

Gabriel frowned. “Why?”

“Because he hates it.”

“No, I don’t,” Adrien protested. “It’s fine, really.”

“Adrien, you hate modeling? Why on earth didn’t you say so?” Gabriel asked, genuinely confused.

“I don’t _hate_ it,” Adrien protested weakly. Both his parents shot him a skeptical look in unison, then turned back to one another.

“Did you even _ask_ him if he wanted to model?” Adele asked. “Or did you just _tell_ him he’d be doing it?”

“Well, I assumed he’d say something if he had any objections. Why wouldn’t he?”

“Because he’s your _son_ ,” Adele said, getting more and more worked up by the second, “and he wants to make you happy. Not everybody is comfortable speaking their mind to the great Gabriel Agreste, you know.”

Gabriel raised an eyebrow. “You never seem to have any trouble with it.”

“ _Adrien is not me_ ,” Adele snapped. “He’s-” she looked back at her son, and suddenly realized exactly how much this fight was bothering him. All the anger went out of her in a flash and she deflated slightly. “Oh. Oh, God, I’m sorry, baby, I didn’t mean to-” she cut herself off with a frustrated sigh. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she repeated. “I should… I should probably be alone.” She got up from the table and walked as fast as she could out of the kitchen, up the stairs, and back to her bedroom.

When Gabriel entered the bedroom after her, about ten minutes later, she was lying sprawled across their bed, facedown into a pillow.

“Are you quite alright?” her husband asked.

In response, Adele groaned loudly into the pillow, then turned her head so she could speak. “I know better than that, Gabriel! I know not to grab someone’s emotions out of their head and start, just, waving them around to other people without their permission! What is _wrong_ with me?” She rolled over onto her back and sighed, looking up at the ceiling. “I don’t know how to be around people anymore, do I?” she asked, utterly despondent.

Gabriel considered this, then walked to the edge of the bed and sat down. “It’s only been two weeks,” he said gently. “Give yourself time.”

“Ugh.”

Gabriel sighed. “Would you like to discuss what just happened?”

“ _Yes_ ,” Adele said, and Gabriel knew she’d tried to say ‘No’ because she immediately looked at the back of her right hand and glared. “Fine,” she said, dropping her hand and going back to staring at the ceiling. “Let’s discuss. I missed four years, Gabriel. And now I’m back, and Adrien’s so much more grown up, and I missed so much, and it kills me inside. So when I find out that he’s been doing something he hates, and I know that if I had been here I could have put a stop to it right away, all I want to do is _fix_ it, because maybe, maybe that’ll make up for everything we lost-but of course it won’t. I just overreact and make everything worse, apparently. I can’t make up for missing four years of being his mother in a week, I know that, but it just feels like there’s so much to fix and I _can’t_.”

“You’re back,” Gabriel said. “What else is there to fix?”

“Well…” Adele took a deep breath. “While I was gone, you and Adrien… how were things between you?”

“Fine,” Gabriel said, and the sad thing was he actually believed it.

“He didn't start going to school until last year, even though we agreed before I left that he could start when he was twelve.”

“Well, I-”

“And it took you, what, nine months to realize he was Chat Noir?”

“You know how the identity protection magic of the Miraculouses works, it’s extremely-”

“You didn't tell him about us. When he asked.”

Gabriel paused. “It was a difficult subject to discuss,” he said defensively.

“So what _did_ you two talk about? In four years?”

Another pause. “Ah,” Gabriel said softly. “I see.” He considered his next words carefully. “Adrien’s emotions towards me, whatever they are, are distressing to you, is that it?”

“He's just so terrified of disappointing you,” Adele whispered. “It's… I know your relationship with him was always much more, well, understated than mine was, but now…”

“I hadn't realized things had gotten so bad.” Gabriel looked away. “Should I go?”

Adele sighed. “No,” she said. She reached for his arm, pulling him back so he was lying next to her, and put her head on his chest. “Stay.” Gabriel wrapped an arm around her and they lay there together, silent.

Two weeks ago simply being in one another's arms had felt like such an impossible miracle, like just the fact of it might solve any problem they ever had to face again. Now… well, it was still wonderful, still something Adele and Gabriel had trouble believing was true, but it was beginning to dawn on both of them that the road ahead might be more complicated than they'd imagined.

 

* * *

 

“Ha! Eat my dust, Agreste!”

Adele and Gabriel were relaxing in one of the sitting rooms, or at least they were trying to. The mansion was usually near-soundproof from room to room, but it was Adrien’s birthday today and he'd invited a few friends over for a low-key celebration centered mainly around snacks and video games played on the biggest screen his three guests had ever seen outside of a movie theater. From the sound of it, Marinette was currently beating him soundly at some kind of racing game.

“Goodness,” Gabriel said, looking up from his book as the sound of Marinette’s friendly-but-aggressive trash talk carried through the halls, “just when I think I have that girl figured out.”

“She is full of surprises,” Adele agreed.

About fifteen minutes later, Adrien and Nino appeared in the room’s doorway. “Hey, Mom,” Adrien said, “can I start grabbing, like, some of the real food? All the junk food’s gone.”

“ _All_ of it?” Adele asked, stunned, as she put her magazine aside.

“I blame Marinette,” Nino said. “I mean, obviously me and Adrien are going to eat everything in sight but man, I do not know where that girl puts it all.”

Adele grinned despite herself, remembering what it was like to be a young woman with superpowers and a metabolism that had suddenly gone through the roof. “Let me see what we have in the kitchen,” she said, getting up. The boys followed her through the mansion, and soon Adele was rooting through various cabinets as Adrien and Nino raided the fridge.

“This was a great idea,” Nino said to Adrien as they moved to the freezer. “Way better than last year,” he added, laughing.

Adele glanced over. “What happened last year?” she asked, and the two of them instantly froze up.

“Oh,” Adrien said. “Um.”

“I got akumatized,” Nino explained.

“Oh. I see. I’m so sorry,” Adele said, trying not to sound like she felt personally responsible.

“Eh, it’s fine,” Nino said casually. “I was just mad ‘cause Adrien’s old man-that is, um,” Nino suddenly remembered who he was talking to, “Adrien’s _father_ , was… worried about the risks of throwing him a party, but he’d never had a real one before, so I thought… and… well, anyway. This year is better.”

Adele nodded. “Yes, it is,” she agreed.

“Oh!” Nino’s face lit up. “I just remembered something, I-wait right here.” He ran out of the kitchen at top speed. Adele looked over at Adrien, who seemed mostly worried at how his mother was taking everything.

“So, just to be clear,” Adele said, “a year ago, your father had a fit of paranoia and refused to let you celebrate your birthday.”

“Um.”

“And then your best friend was understandably upset by this, at which point your uncle swooped in and… what, turned him into a birthday party throwing supervillain?”

“Yeah,” Adrien said slowly, “something like that.”

Adele sighed. “Well,” she muttered under her breath as she returned to looking for snacks, “if that isn’t just the perfect microcosm of last year.”

Before Adrien could reply, Nino ran back into the kitchen, holding a CD case. To Adele’s surprise, he walked up to her and presented it. “What’s this?” she asked, confused.

“Uh, well, I’m pretty into music,” Nino explained, “and I know you, um, missed a lot of it, so this is just, like, in my opinion that is, the top twenty songs from the last four years.” Adele took a moment to absorb this, and then she gently took the CD from him and stared at it wordlessly for a minute. “Mrs. Agreste? Are you alright?”

Adele nodded, her eyes filling up with tears. “Fine,” she managed to get out, “I’m-” she hugged Nino spontaneously. “This was very thoughtful, thank you,” she whispered to the surprised teen.

“Oh-yeah, sure, I mean it wasn’t any trouble or anything,” Nino said sheepishly.

Just then, the girls came in. “What is taking you guys so-” Alya stopped talking and looked at Nino and Mrs. Agreste, confused.

“I told you she’d like it,” Nino stage-whispered to her, and Adele smiled and released him.

“You guys are done with the round already?” Adrien asked.

Marinette rolled her eyes. “Alya’s very distracted,” she said. Neither Adele nor Adrien could figure out why Marinette seemed so annoyed by this, when it had won her the game-until, that is, Alya revealed what she was distracted by.

“Don’t you guys think it’s _weird_ that Hawkmoth isn’t in jail?” Alya asked. Adrien froze for a second before forcing himself to relax, while Nino groaned loudly.

“Alya, you promised you’d forget about all that during Adrien’s birthday.”

“They _must_ have seen him if they took his Miraculous, right? He would have turned back into whoever he actually is.”

“We don’t know that,” Nino said. “We don’t know what happens when you take a Miraculous from someone. Maybe he stayed in costume long enough to get away.”

Alya leaned on the island countertop, still preoccupied. “Why wasn’t Chat Noir helping Ladybug defeat the last akuma?” Adrien raised an eyebrow at Marinette at this.

“Maybe he was chasing Hawkmoth?” Marinette suggested unconvincingly.

“No, Ladybug _knew_ he’d been defeated by the time she showed up. The fight with Hawkmoth must have already been over. What if-there’s this theory on the Ladyblog forums some guy came up with, it’s super long, I’ll send it to you guys, it’s really convincing. But basically, it’s that Chat Noir had to use a Cataclysm more than five minutes before the end of the showdown with Hawkmoth, and now _Hawkmoth_ knows who _he_ is. So the reason Hawkmoth isn’t in jail now is that they’re stuck in mutually-assured destruction. If they reveal who he is, he’ll out Chat. Get it?”

Adele, Adrien and Marinette were all speechless. Fortunately, Nino wasn’t.

“ _Alya_ ,” he said, exasperated, “you _promised_ you wouldn’t do this.” He grabbed her hand. “I am sitting you down in front of that video game and you are going to play it until enough of your brain cells are dead that you forget about all this.” He dragged her out of the kitchen, and the three that remained each exhaled in relief.

“I _told_ you,” Adrien said to Marinette, “that you should have waited for me before taking the akuma down.”

“Oh, you’re just mad I got to make all the cat puns without you,” Marinette said.

“I’m serious!”

Adele sighed. “I really thought getting the Butterfly Miraculous back would be enough to give people peace of mind, but if they’re still worrying about Hawkmoth being on the loose-”

“They’re not,” Marinette insisted. “It’s just Alya and the conspiracy fans who follow her blog. Everyone else in Paris is moving on, I promise. We don’t need to risk Adrien’s identity by turning him in.”

“Would it really risk my identity that much?” Adrien asked.

“Maybe not on its own,” Adele said, “but right after Ladybug and Chat Noir went on a highly uncharacteristic mission to rescue your mother, and given how good your friend is at connecting dots already-yes, I think that would be one too many connections to the Agreste family.”

“It’ll be fine,” Marinette said. “Come on, let’s go back.” She took Adrien’s hand, and he relaxed somewhat as she pulled him off.


	3. Jonathan

“It feels weird to be doing this alone,” Adele said softly, gazing out the passenger window of the car. From the driver’s seat, her husband raised an eyebrow. “Not that I’m _alone_ alone,” she amended, “and I’m very glad you and Adrien are here, but… it still feels weird without him.”

Adele caught the now familiar flash of rage that Gabriel experienced, whenever she alluded to her brother, but he did his best to smother it quickly, so Adele did her best to ignore it. “I know,” was all he said in response.

“I’m not saying I wish he were here,” she added.

“I know.”

Adele had lost both her parents by the time she was sixteen, and Jonathan a few months shy of twenty-one. Every year since then, on their parents’ anniversary, the two of them had made the journey to the country, to their parents’ manor, through the woods and up the hill to where they were buried, to remember, to connect, to reflect on the past year.

Well, not every year. Adele had missed the last three, obviously.

It was nearly dusk when the manor came into view, and Adele took a moment to simply appreciate the sight. It had been such a staple of her childhood, this place, and as an adult she’d always drawn a certain measure of comfort and strength from it. Now it was the final piece of Adele’s homecoming, the last place she needed to visit to feel like she'd truly returned.

“Um,” Adrien said from the backseat. Adele turned around to look at him.

“Something wrong, sweetheart?” she asked. He was incredibly apprehensive all of a sudden.

“Uh… you said it feels weird to be here without Uncle Jonathan?”

“Well, yes, but that doesn’t mean-”

“Isn’t that his car?”

Adele whirled back around. “I don’t see-”

“There,” Adrien said, leaning forward from the back seat and pointing. “Parked right there.”

There was still some time to go until actual sunset, but the way the shadows were currently falling made it difficult to see the driveway. Adele thought she could make out a dark shape that might have been a car, but she couldn’t have begun to identify it. “Are you sure?” she asked, skeptical.

“Yeah,” he said, somewhat apologetically. “My low-light vision’s been amazing ever since getting my Miraculous.”

Adele looked at her husband. He was keeping his eyes on the road, but his knuckles on the steering wheel were now white. “Are you alright?” she asked.

“I suppose nothing that man does should come as a surprise to me anymore,” Gabriel said, “but I had hoped he’d at least have the decency to go crawl off under a rock somewhere and rot.” He glanced at Adele. “Are _you_ alright?” She sighed, but didn’t answer. Gabriel set his jaw. “You and Adrien wait in the car,” he said. “I’ll get rid of him.”

Adele scoffed. “There is no way I’m waiting in the car,” she said. She looked back at her son. “Adrien, wait in the car.”

“Seriously?” Adrien looked back and forth between his parents. “You two remember that _I’m_ the superhero now, right? If anything, you guys should be the ones waiting in the car.”

“Listen to your mother, Adrien.”

It took about five minutes to reach the house; by then, it was very obvious to all three Agrestes that Jonathan was, in fact, waiting there. He was leaning against the outside of his car, not looking at them as they approached. It was the first Adele had seen of him in years, and he was barely recognizable. He didn’t look like he’d been eating or sleeping well, and the playful, mischievous spark in his eyes that Adele had always taken for granted was completely gone.

Gabriel pulled up, braked suddenly and put the car into park with a noticeable jerk. Adele was already moving to get out, but Gabriel had parked so that she’d have to walk around the car to reach Jonathan, and her husband got to him first.

“How dare you show your face here, after everything- _get back in the car, Adrien_ -you’ve put this family through? After everything you put our city through?”

Jonathan stayed leaning against his car. “It’s not really any of your fucking business why I’m here,” he said. There was anger in his voice, but it was almost numb, like he’d been living with it for a long time.

“Watch your language in front of my son,” Gabriel snapped. Jonathan’s eyes widened in disbelief.

“Watch my _language_?” he repeated. “In front of the same son I nearly killed at least a dozen times over the past year? Sure, I’ll watch my language. I’d hate to traumatize the poor kid.”

“You know,” Adrien said calmly, “I think technically you did kill me at least once.” Before he could respond, Adele had appeared, putting an arm around her son.

“What are you doing here, Jonathan?” Adele asked wearily. Jonathan looked at her and straightened.

“I-” Jonathan looked right into her eyes, and it seemed the sight of her, in person for the first time in four years, had shocked the breath right out of him. “It’s their anniversary,” he finally said.

“You have no right to be here,” Gabriel said, fuming, “after-”

“It’s none of your business, Agreste,” Jonathan said again. “I-look, if Adele tells me she wants me gone, I’m gone, okay? It doesn’t really have anything to do with anybody else.”

Gabriel clenched his jaw. “Fine,” he said. He looked at his wife expectantly.

Adele examined her brother. He was… Jesus, he was a mess on the inside. He must have been having about twenty different emotions at once, all pulling him in different directions. Roughly half of them were some form of anger, but it was all so unfocused, so scattered. Beyond that, there were other things-despair, hope, frustration. No deception, though-he’d honestly meant it when he said that if Adele told him she wanted him gone, he’d leave. And Adele could tell that he fully, 100% expected her to say it. He’d driven three hours thinking that this angry, awkward fifteen seconds would be the only interaction he’d get with her.

Sighing, Adele looked at her husband. “I can’t,” she said.

“Of course you can,” Gabriel said, not understanding her meaning. “Just-”

“ _Gabriel_. I literally can’t.”

Gabriel’s gaze flickered, for the barest half of a second, to Adele’s right hand, which she’d had the foresight to shove inside her coat pocket. “Oh,” he said. He didn't seem to know what to do with this information.

Adele looked back at Jonathan, who couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing. “You’re gone in twenty minutes, got it?” she demanded. After a second he nodded silently, and Adele started walking briskly towards the gravesite.

 

* * *

 

“Hi, Mom. Dad. Um. Long time, no see. I, uh… I’m sorry I missed the last few years. I… you remember the last time I was here, I said I was done letting fear rule my life, that I was going to start taking risks again, and I, uh… Jesus, I really over-corrected.” Adele took a shaky breath before continuing. “It’s been… awful, mostly. I didn’t think I’d ever make it back here.” She wiped away a few tears, but more quickly followed. “But I did! I’m back now, I made it out, it still feels like an impossible dream sometimes, but here I am. Gabriel rescued me, and-” Adele felt a sudden flash of emotion from Jonathan, and she remembered that he only knew the official version of what had happened. Gabriel’s involvement in her rescue would be news to him.

Turned out he _really_ didn’t like hearing about it. For some reason, it infuriated him.

“... and Adrien helped,” Adele continued. “Your grandson, he’s a superhero now! He’s awfully young, I know, but God, you’d be so proud of him. He’s incredible. He’s-I can already tell he’s going to be so much better than we were.” Adele stood where she was for a few more seconds, then took a deep breath and a step back. She glanced at her brother, who stepped forward and cleared his throat.

“Hi, guys. So… last year I said I’d do whatever it took to get Adele back. And I warned you that you wouldn’t like it. I said I’d do things you’d never be proud of, but they’d be worth it because they’d get her back. Well… I did, and they weren’t. Like, at all. Nothing I did in the four years she was gone amounted to anything, nothing got anyone a single step closer to bringing her back. But she’s back anyway, so…” he trailed off.

“Done?” Adele asked, after a full minute of silence. Jonathan nodded. “Good.” She turned around abruptly and began walking back.

 

* * *

 

They were almost to the driveway, having walked the entire way without exchanging a single word, when Jonathan stopped suddenly. “Look,” he said, breaking the silence, “I can tell that there's something you want to say, so why don't you just-”

Adele slapped him across the face as hard as she could.

He must have seen it coming, she realized afterward, but he hadn't even tried to avoid it. He just sighed. “Or that,” he said.

“Stay the hell out of my head,” Adele said, her voice pure venom.

“I can't turn it off, Adele, you of all people should know that.”

“Well… keep it to yourself, then. I don't need any goddamn reminders that you're an empath now.”

Jonathan sighed. “Fair enough. So?”

“I-” Now that Adele had allowed herself to snap, she wasn't sure she'd be able to continue to form coherent sentences. “I don't even know where to _begin_. I… you… I asked you to do _one thing_ , Jonathan!”

Jonathan raised his eyebrows, genuinely surprised. “ _That’s_ what you're mad about? That-I mean, I expected you to be mad about the past year, but you're mad I tried to _find_ you?”

“I’m mad about all of it! But you're damn right that's near the top of the list. I didn't asked you to find me, I asked you to take care of my son, and you didn't. The last four years of my life have been hell, they've been a waking nightmare, and the two things that made them at all _survivable_ was knowing you-” Ugh, she couldn't say that, could she?

Jonathan frowned as Adele desperately tried to smother the choking noise in her throat. “Are you okay?” he asked, concerned.

“ _Thinking_ that I knew,” Adele corrected, once she'd recovered her power of speech, “that you were looking out for Adrien, and thinking I knew that I hadn't sacrificed my life for nothing because at least I'd kept the Butterfly Miraculous out of the hands of villains who would abuse its power. And thanks to you, _neither_ of those things was actually true!”

“Adrien was fine,” Jonathan said. “You weren't.”

“Oh, was he? What was that I just heard about you practically killing him? Repeatedly?” Jonathan’s face went a shade paler.

“Adele,” he said, dead serious, “you have to believe me, if I'd had _any_ idea that Chat Noir was Adrien, I _never_ would have-”

“You practically killed his father at least once, don't even try to tell me _that_ wasn't intentional.”

“That was just-I wasn’t _trying_ to kill him, I was making a _point_ , he-you’d been gone a week, okay, and he rejected the damn Miraculous, he gave up on you because he was afraid, he just kept going on and on about how the Miraculouses were so _dangerous_ ,” Jonathan was talking more and more rapidly now, and more to himself now than to his sister, “well how safe did he feel without it then, huh? It served him right, he never would have been in any danger if he’d kept it, but he still wouldn’t take it back, he was still too afraid to do something, _anything-_ ”

“My God,” Adele interrupted, “you really have lost it, haven’t you?”

Jonathan exhaled, and the anger that Adele had felt building up during his rant died down somewhat. “What was your first clue?” he asked wryly.

“For your information,” Adele snapped, “Gabriel is not a coward. He thought what he was doing was the best way to keep our family safe. And he stayed committed to it, even after you attacked him. He didn’t take the Miraculous back until he knew it was right for our family. He took it back when he knew he could use it to rescue me.”

“Well, that’s just-”

“Shut. Up. I haven’t gotten anywhere _near_ finishing. I… do you have any idea what it was like? I gave up hope of getting out years ago, but I got out, I escaped hell on earth, I made it home, and when I got back, you _weren't there_. And… when I was trapped in that place, I imagined coming home so many times, so many different ways-and not all of them good, either. Sometimes I’d wonder, you know, when I was feeling particularly hopeless, if horrible things had happened in my absence. I had no way of knowing if everyone I loved was even still alive, after all. I thought I'd imagined the worst case-scenarios. But I never, _never_ imagined anything like this. You know, I wish you had been d-” Again Adele choked on her sentence, and Jonathan instantly became concerned.

“Adele?” God, she was usually so good at managing the damn geis, but Adele wasn’t thinking straight now, and it was hard to work around it when she had so much she needed to say.

“I don’t wish you’d died,” she said, more calmly, “but… but it would have hurt a lot less.”

Jonathan nodded slowly. “Yeah,” he said softly. “I get that. I know… I know from the outside it must look completely awful, but I swear it was always just about saving you.”

“If that’s the case,” Adele said angrily, “then why didn’t you _stop_? I was back! I was alive, I was home, and you kept _going_. Maybe, maybe if you'd just given it back, maybe then I could believe-”

“I almost did,” Jonathan told her. Adele scoffed.

“Oh, really? What the hell stopped you?”

“You.”

“What?”

“I got close enough to sense your emotions,” he said. “And they were… you were just so… and I realized it wasn't enough for you to just be alive, not after four years of whatever you went through that made you feel like _that_.”

Thirty seconds ago, Adele had honestly believed she couldn't have been angrier at her brother. Now she realized just how wrong that was. “Oh, _fuck you_ ,” she spat. “Like I don't feel responsible enough for everything you’ve done, now it's my fault you didn't stop because I wasn't immediately a fucking ball of sunshine after four years of captivity?”

“Jesus, no!” Jonathan said, horrified. “I-none of this is _your_ fault, where the hell are you getting that idea? I just wanted to fix it!”

“By terrorizing Paris? That's your idea of fixing things? My happiness isn't worth that, Jonathan, my life isn't worth that! It's not worth a year of supervillains attacking people, making everyone scared of their own emotions, violating people’s innermost-”

“None of it was going to have happened!” Jonathan interrupted, frustrated.

“What? What the hell does that even mean?”

“I was going to…” Jonathan took a breath. “Adele, I think maybe you don't appreciate what Miraculouses are truly capable of.”

“Excuse me? I don't-the last time I checked, I saved two realities with a Miraculous. What did you ever accomplish that wasn't undone in the space of half an hour by two teenagers in spandex?”

“Time travel.”

That caught Adele off-guard. “The Butterfly Miraculous can't give someone anything that powerful.”

“It was, admittedly, really shitty time travel,” Jonathan said. “Practically useless, actually. But that was with one minor Miraculous. With the two major ones, though… I could have fixed _everything_. I could have gone back four years, and, I don't know, talked some sense into you, or warned Gabriel in time so he could have gone after you. You would have come home, you would have kept being Butterfly, and I never would have akumatized anyone.”

For an instant, just an instant, it sounded like a really good idea, and that terrified Adele. She mentally shook it off, sighing. “It never would have worked,” she said.

“Why not?”

“You can't use the major Miraculouses like that without consequences, Jonathan. You knew that when you started all this, you just didn't care. And even if that weren't true, it still wouldn't have worked because _you_ would have been the one wielding them!”

“So?”

“So? So you got ahold of one Miraculous, one minor Miraculous, and you instantly became a terroristic supervillain. What the hell makes you think you could have handled _godlike power_ with anything even vaguely resembling wisdom?” Adele took another breath. “Are you even sorry?” she asked.

Jonathan sighed. “Would it mean anything at all if I were?” he asked.

“It might. To me, anyway, I can't speak for the rest of Paris.”

“I… want to be.”

Adele groaned. “Jesus. Do you hear yourself?”

“I mean it,” he said, somewhat desperately, “but every time I think about everything and try to feel remorse, real remorse, I just get so _angry_ instead. It's the only thing I can feel half the time. I just start thinking about how _close_ I got, how I almost fixed it all. It's all I can think about sometimes-I can't sleep, I can't eat, I just obsess constantly.”

Adele sighed, annoyed. “You know that's probably at least partly due to the akumas, right?”

Jonathan rolled his eyes. “What, the akumas poisoning my energy? The mysterious energy only your precious Guardian can see?”

“It’s not made up. I’ve created akumas too, remember, and I’ve felt it. And I’ve always immediately gotten my energy cleared, except for on the last one, the one in Tibet. I could feel for at least a month after. And that was _one_ akuma. I’ve never even made a second one without the first one getting cleared, and _you_ made…” she groaned again and pinched the bridge of her nose. “I know, I _know_ I’m going to regret asking this, but how many did you make, exactly?”

Jonathan shrugged. “I lost count,” he said. “Not quite two hundred, I think.”

It took real effort for Adele to keep her jaw from dropping. “Jesus fucking Christ. Well, yeah, that would do it.” She sighed. “I could-not that you deserve it or anything-but I could ask the Guardian if he’d-” Jonathan cut her off with a humorless laugh.

“Adele, I’d better never meet that man in real life.”

Adele snapped. “Well, fine! Just ignore it then, because apparently nothing’s wro-” Jesus, not _again_.

“Oh my God,” Jonathan said, finally fed up, “why do you keep _doing_ that?” Adele could tell she was actually scaring him now, and that changing the subject wouldn’t work any more.

“You want to know?” she asked. “It's-you make me so goddamn _furious_ I keep forgetting I can't be sarcastic anymore.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

Adele took a deep breath, let it out, and then pulled her hand out of her pocket and held the back of it up to Jonathan. He looked at it closely for a moment, then went very still. All the conflicting, chaotic emotions within him faded away, and all that was left was a cold, focused rage. “Who did that to you?” he asked quietly.

“Don't worry about it,” Adele said, still annoyed. “I took care of him.”

“Really?”

“Well, not by myself,” she said. “Gabriel helped. After he was done rescuing me.” She said it mostly to be petty, because she knew it would bother Jonathan. “It's why they kept me alive,” Adele continued. “They liked having an empath to screen out traitors. But it quickly became obvious to them that they wouldn't be able to trust me without some measures in place, so… now I've got this.”

“Why the hell did you try to hide it from me?”

Adele raised an eyebrow. “In case you hadn't noticed, bad things seem to happen when you get worried about me.” Jonathan didn't bother protesting this. He squinted at the back of her hand, and as his anger started to die down, another emotion began to replace it, one that for a second almost made him recognizable again.

Curiosity.

“Do you…” Jonathan hesitated, and looked up at Adele somewhat nervously, “do you want me to break it?”

For a moment, Adele didn't understand what he'd said. “Like… get rid of it?”

“Yeah.”

“The FBI couldn't get rid of it.”

Jonathan rolled his eyes. “That sounds about right,” he muttered derisively.

“What, you know something the FBI doesn't?”

“No, I'm just less squeamish about controlled materials.”

Adele froze, then yanked her hand away. “I wish this went without saying, but obviously it doesn't: _Do not_ do _anything_ I would find even _slightly_ morally objectionable in order to break this thing.”

“Calm down, it's not going to require a human sacrifice or anything. Just a couple of things that could be used for nefarious purposes. But I’d only be using them for this.”

“Well…” she looked at the back of her hand, then at her brother. “Do you really think you could?”

“Don't get your hopes too far up, but… I mean, I know where to start looking.”

Adele paused. “It wouldn't make up for anything,” she said.

“I know that. I'm not a complete idiot.”

“Well, then…” Adele sighed in exasperation, “yes, obviously I want it off.”

“Okay. Hold still.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket and took a picture of the geis. “I’ll call you if I have anything.”

“Fine.” She paused. “Jonathan?”

“Yeah?”

“Don't… don’t call for any other reason. Or show up unannounced again. I don't-I know I let you stay, but I really don't appreciate you pulling emotionally charged stunts like this. I don't want you showing up in a couple of months because it’s Christmas, or calling, and I sure as hell better not find out there are any strings attached to your offer to break this geis. Got it?”

Jonathan nodded. “Understood.” It ripped him apart inside, to hear all that, and Adele could feel it. But Jonathan could sense how hard it had been for Adele to say, which he found strangely comforting. And Adele could sense that, too-because they were both empaths now so, geis or no, there would never really be any secrets between them ever again.


	4. New Year's Eve

“I'm going for a walk,” Adele told her husband one afternoon in mid-December, as she entered his study. He looked up from reviewing concept art for a new dress line, surprised.

“It's freezing out,” he said.

“They’ve got these things, I think they're called ‘coats’? It’s my understanding they're very effective when used correctly.”

Gabriel raised an eyebrow and leaned back in his desk chair. “I see you've figured out how to be sarcastic again,” he said. Adele grinned.

“It's a work in progress. Anyway, I'll have my phone, so if anything comes up you can-”

“Are you sure you don't want the car?” her husband interrupted. “I can have the driver pull up in five minutes ready to take you anywhere-”

“It's not-I don't need to go anywhere specifically, I just need to go for a walk, that's all.”

“Why?”

Adele shrugged. “Because I can?”

After a pause, Gabriel nodded. He seemed to grasp at least some of her meaning. “Well, call if you need to be picked up,” he said, returning to his work.

“I will.” She walked around the desk and lightly kissed her husband’s forehead before leaving.

It had been about three and a half months now. Things that had seemed too good to be true at first, Adele was finally taking for granted. That she could see her husband or her son any time she wanted, that she could move around as she pleased, that nobody was going to force her to do anything, that she could raise her voice or argue with anyone without the threat of physical retribution.

That she could leave, if she wanted.

The taking of these things for granted, however, came and went. Adele could go for days, weeks, without feeling confined, and then one day suddenly be consumed with a desperate need to just walk in one direction, or in any random path, for hours, just to prove to herself that her world no longer had boundaries.

Today was one of those days.

 

* * *

 

After a couple of hours of walking, Adele found herself standing a few doors down from the Tom & Sabine Boulangerie Patisserie. She'd made no conscious decision to go there-she wasn't even sure she remembered the way anymore, after so long. Adele felt a small pang of shame as she realized she probably should have at least called Marinette's parents months ago. She wasn't sure what the formal rules of etiquette demanded, when someone's daughter went on a dangerous mission to rescue you and almost lost her life in the process, but it was probably _something_.

It was overcast, and beginning to get darker now that it was early evening. The warm yellow light shining through the storefront window offered a stark, cheery contrast to the rest of the street, and Adele almost had the sense that to enter would somehow soil that light. But she braced herself and went on, walking up to the door and pushing through.

There was one other customer inside, a young man that Sabine was ringing up. “Be with you in a moment!” she called as she heard the door open, not looking over. Adele wandered over to a display case and idly began looking through it, not wanting to interrupt. A minute later, she heard the door to the shop open and close again as the customer left. “Is there anything I can help you with?” Sabine asked her. Adele turned around and smiled nervously.

“Hi,” she said. “I’m-I should have called first, I know, but-”

“Oh!” Sabine exclaimed, recognizing her immediately. She hurried around the counter to Adele and threw her arms around the surprised woman. “It’s so wonderful to finally meet you! Marinette told us-hang on.” Sabine crossed to the door, flipped the sign to read ‘CLOSED’, locked the door, and returned to hugging Adele. “Marinette told us all about how you saved her life in America,” she said. “How can we ever repay you?”

Adele did her best to keep from sputtering. “I-repay _me_? You’re daughter’s the one who saved _me_ , she wouldn’t have been in any danger at all if it weren’t for-she’s saved my son’s life so many times, I’m the one who can’t repay-your daughter almost died rescuing me and you _sent me cannolis_!” Sabine laughed as Adele hugged her back fiercely.

Five minutes later, Adele was sitting down with Sabine and Tom at a small table in the back. Sabine had produced a plate of macarons while Tom had handed Adele a mug of hot chocolate with as much whipped cream piled on top as was physically possible. They made easy, friendly conversation for over an hour, and Adele couldn’t have felt better by the end of it.

Adele was stunned at how the two of them managed to take all the wild, crazy details that made up her life and wring out actual small talk from them. They asked about her superhero career in the 90s as well as what she’d studied in university, as though the two were equally interesting. They made little jokes about how many plans Marinette had cancelled last-minute over the past year for Ladybug business, in exactly the same way other parents joked about their teens sleeping in or listening to loud music-and they made those jokes, too. They asked Adele for advice, as a former superhero, on how they could support their daughter better, as though they were asking for advice on finding a math tutor. Marinette’s parents, in short, raised “normal” to an art form.

 

* * *

 

“We’re spending New Year’s Eve with the Dupain-Chengs,” Adele informed her husband later that evening, while the two of them were reading in bed.

Gabriel looked over at her. “Pardon?”

“When I was out this afternoon,” she explained, “I wound up at their bakery, I went in, we had a nice long conversation, and they invited us over. They host Tom’s entire family every year, and they insisted they could happily fit three more.”

“Why?” Gabriel asked.

“Well for starters, we don’t have plans. And I thought it would be a good idea to spend some time with Marinette’s family.”

“Why?” he repeated.

Adele raised an eyebrow. “The girl spent the last year fighting supervillains alongside your son, you don’t think it might be a good idea to get to know her parents a little better?”

Gabriel blinked. “I fail to see how the two are connected,” he said. Adele sighed deeply.

“Our children are out together every night fighting crime, keeping the city safe, defeating evil. That puts the four of us in a somewhat unique position in this city, and I for one think it would be a good idea to bond over that. And they’re wonderful people, and they already adore Adrien; it’ll be good for him if our two families are close. Besides, there’s about a 98% chance Adrien marries their daughter one day, and-oh, don’t act so scandalized, Gabriel, you look ridiculous-and it’ll be easier to make sure we get the grandkids for the holidays we want if her parents like us already.”

“Our son is _fifteen_ ,” Gabriel said indignantly, “and you’re already scheduling holidays with grandchildren?”

“Our son is sixteen, Gabriel,” Adele said, annoyed. “And I’m not saying they’ll be getting married anytime _soon_ , but… oh, you’ve seen them together, both in costume and out. You don’t see it?”

Gabriel sighed. “I suppose. In these matters, I defer to your expertise.” He paused. “How large a gathering will it be?”

“I don’t recall the exact number, but it’ll be us, Marinette’s family, Tom’s parents, both of his brothers, their wives, and all their children. Oh, and Sabine said Marinette’s oldest cousin is married, so she’ll be bringing her husband and her baby.”

“That sounds like a fair number of people. Are you sure you’ll be alright?”

Adele shrugged. “I think so,” she said. “I can’t keep avoiding social gatherings forever, it’s time to start taking more steps back into the world. It’s not too hard to manage the geis-and I’ll have you, Adrien, Marinette, and both her parents, all around to run interference in case any of Marinette’s relatives start getting too nosy. It’ll be fine, darling.”

“Well… if you think it’s for the best,” Gabriel said reluctantly.

“I do,” Adele assured him.

 

* * *

 

“Come in, come in!” Tom Dupain said cheerfully, opening the door and ushering the Agreste family inside. “The festivities are one floor up, through here, this way, I’ll take your coats, the rest of my family’s already here, hang on, I’ll announce you.”

“Oh, that’s not-”

“Everyone!” Tom shouted, as they reached the top of the stairs and entered the living space, “Marinette’s friend is here!” Every head in the room immediately turned toward them. Marinette rushed over from the other side of the apartment.

“Adrien!” she said, lighting up like she always did whenever she saw him. He grinned back at her.

Marinette’s father started leading the Agrestes through the apartment, introducing them to everyone in his family. Adele quickly lost track of exactly how they were all related, both because of the sheer number of them and also because everyone’s emotional reaction to meeting her and her family was somewhat distracting. Everyone had clearly been warned ahead of time that ‘Marinette’s friend and his parents’ meant the very famous Gabriel Agreste and his wife, the woman who had been in the news for months after everyone’s favorite superheroes had, effectively, brought her back from the dead. Actually, the media coverage might have been a lot worse if Adele’s return hadn’t been overshadowed a week later by the defeat of Hawkmoth, but it was still a common topic of discussion and rampant speculation in the city. Adele could tell everyone was curious, and had been warned not to bring it up. She could also tell that at least one of the younger children absolutely would not be making it through the night without cracking.

To Adele’s surprise, though, the adults gathered pretty much stopped caring within the first ten minutes. Gabriel and Adele were quickly drawn into a conversation with one of Tom’s brothers about what building a fashion empire from the ground up had been like, and Marinette had roped Adrien into helping her put food out, while one of her cousins hovered around them both and mostly just asked Marinette questions about some album art she’d apparently done for a famous rock star earlier that year. Before dinner had even begun, Adele found herself feeling welcomed, relaxed, at home.

 

* * *

 

“Can I help?” Adrien asked, walking up next to Marinette at the sink. Dinner was over, and Marinette had been assigned dishwashing duty by her parents, with firm instructions to finish before the desserts appeared. She looked over at him, surprised.

“Sure,” she said. She started to hand him a sponge, then pulled it back. “Wait. Have you ever washed a dish in your life?” she asked suspiciously.

“Um. No,” he admitted. “But better plate than never, right?” he added, grinning. Marinette snorted, then smacked him with a dish towel, still laughing.

From the other side of the kitchen, Adele watched the two of them and smiled. She’d been right-it was good for Adrien to be in this kind of an environment. For a sheltered rich kid, he took to this kind of domesticity surprisingly well, and for an only child with almost no extended relatives worth mentioning, he was remarkably comfortable in the middle of a big family gathering.

“Are you a spy?” a voice coming from near Adele’s waist asked. Adele looked down and saw Marinette’s cousin Lacey looking up at her. Adele quickly scanned the apartment. Adrien and Marinette were still washing dishes, joking with each other in low voices and ignoring everything around them. Gabriel was on the other side of the apartment, and Marinette’s parents were both in the middle of clearing the table-it seemed Adele’s entire safety net was indisposed. Oh, well. Part of the point of the evening was to practice navigating these kinds of awkward conversations, after all.

“No,” Adele told the little girl, smiling. “Are you a spy?”

“No. _Were_ you a spy?” Lacey asked, with a tone that suggested she was very familiar with these kinds of smart-ass technicalities and wasn't going to be having any of it tonight.

“No,” Adele told her patiently, “I've never been a spy.”

“My brother said you were a spy.” Lacey pointed across the apartment, to a gangly teen currently talking to Marinette’s father about something.

“How does he know?” Adele asked.

“He's going to university next year,” Lacey said, as though that explained everything. “He’s graduating early.”

“You know,” Adele said lightly, “I also went to university. And while he does sound like a very intelligent young man, one could make the argument that I'd know better than your brother whether I'm a spy or not.”

“He says everyone knows. He says that nobody believes you’re really just a regular person, that everyone knows you spent four years infiltrating,” she stumbled a bit over that particular vocabulary word, “those bad people.”

“If that's the case, then everyone's wrong.”

“So you really are just a regular person?”

Adele briefly considered how to answer this in a way that was technically honest. “What do you think?”

“I think you're a spy.”

“Well, okay sweetie. I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree on that.” Lacey narrowed her eyes suspiciously, but before she could ask any follow-up questions Marinette happened to glance over.

“ _Lacey_!” she shouted exasperatedly, shaking suds off her hands frantically before rushing over. “Shoo! I _know_ your dad told you earlier not to bother Adrien’s mom, don’t make me get him.” Lacey quickly glanced across the apartment at her father and scampered off before he noticed Marinette yelling at her. Marinette sighed and turned to Adele. “I am so sorry,” she said, mortified.

“Oh, it was fine,” Adele assured her. “She’s precocious, isn’t she?”

Marinette rolled her eyes. “That’s one word for it.”

 

* * *

 

About an hour later, Adele was making conversation with Tom when Marinette’s oldest cousin Sarah, the one with the baby, wandered over. Adele grinned and cooed at the little infant in the woman’s arms. “Isn’t she adorable! What’s her name? How old is she?”

“Yes, Ava, and she’ll be six months next week,” Sarah said, smiling. “I can’t believe how good she’s being, actually, it’s way past her bedtime, but it’s hard to stick to a schedule when the family’s all together like this, everybody wants a turn with her, you know how it is.” Adele, who did not, nodded politely and continued to make faces at the baby. “Oh, shoot,” Sarah continued. “I just remembered, I left her stuffed bear downstairs, I won’t be able to put her down without it. Could you hold her?” Adele nodded and the woman handed her baby over and rushed off.

While Adele had been talking to Sarah, Tom had let his attention wander to another conversation to his left. He happened to glance over shortly after Sarah left, and noticed Adele hadn’t moved since taking the baby. “You don’t have to hold her quite that tight,” he said, laughing. Adele still didn’t move, and Tom finally noticed she was shaking. “Are you okay?”

“Um. I think… I think you’d better take this baby from me,” Adele said, making no motion whatsoever to hand it over. Tom quickly plucked the baby from her arms, surprisingly deftly and tenderly for such a large man, and put a hand to Adele’s shoulder. “What’s wrong?”

“I… is there somewhere I could lie down, for a minute?”

“One more flight up, first door on the right.”

Adele nodded, not making eye contact, and left.

Once she’d reached the room, Adele turned on a small, dim lamp and sat on the bed. She tried to focus on slowing her breathing down, but it was impossible to tell if she was actually succeeding or not. She was still shaking, and the tips of her fingers were beginning to go numb.

“Adele?” There was a soft knock at the door, and then Sabine’s face as it opened a crack. “Can I come in?”

“Oh, sure,” Adele said, trying to sound calm. Sabine gently closed the door behind her and sat down next to Adele. “I'm sorry,” Adele said, “I don't mean to keep disrupting your family-”

“Nonsense,” Sabine interrupted. “Are you alright? Was Lacey bothering you again?”

“No, no, no, nothing like that,” Adele said in a rush. “Everyone's been lovely.”

“Did something happen?”

“Not exactly. Your niece handed me her baby, that's all. Perfectly ordinary thing to do. It's just-it reminded me of the last time I held a baby, and that didn't go so well.”

Sabine took Adele’s hand, which kept shaking. “Do you want to talk about it, dear?”

Adele tried to say, ‘No,’ but she couldn't.

Then she tried to say, ‘I don't want to bother you with it,’ but she couldn't say that, either. So she took a deep breath and let it out.

“It was about… three and half years ago,” Adele began.

“Oh,” Sabine said, surprised, because she was perfectly capable of doing basic arithmetic in her head.

“Yeah, it was when I was in that place. I was, um, always looking for a way out, for the first couple of years. And I didn't have much to work with, but I still had my empathy. So early on, I thought I'd use it to identify people that might be, you know, sympathetic. I tried a few times, actually-obviously nothing ever came of any of it, but this was the first attempt. She was this doctor. God, she was so young. Twenty-three, maybe? Only two years out of medical school, I think. And she really believed in this place-most of them did, they'd all been hurt by magic and it wasn't hard for Henrik to take advantage of that. So I knew I'd have to be slow about it, careful.

“But this woman, I could tell that she was really bothered by the way I was treated. She told herself it was a necessary evil, I think, but it was an opening all the same. And I saw her once a month, for quick, basic check-ups. So I thought I'd slowly build a relationship, get her to care about me. And then, one day, I'd say something like ‘If only my son knew I was still alive, it kills me that he doesn't know,’ and convince her to send a note for me, convince her she could do it without giving away where I was or what had actually happened to me, right? And once my family got that note, Gabriel or… or someone, might be able to trace it back to me somehow.” Adele shrugged. “Maybe it was always a long shot, but I didn't get far so I don't know.”

Sabine nodded as Adele fell silent, and put her other hand over Adele's. “And this woman, she had a baby?”

Adele nodded. “Her first. I saw the pictures, she had new ones every time they took me in, but I forced myself to wait until the third visit to say anything. And it was completely innocuous. ‘Oh, aren't they just precious at that age, watch out, she’ll be walking before you know it,’ and so on. I'm sure dozens of other mothers had said something like that to her before, you know? But now she knows I'm a mother, too, now we have that bond. And the guard couldn't have cared less that I'd said it. And I made myself wait again, and then on the fifth visit I gave her some advice about getting them to sleep through the night, I don't even remember what it was. Just something friendly.

“And then, on the seventh visit-I was nowhere near ready to approach her about helping me, you understand-she had her baby with her. Poor thing was teething and fussy, so the doctor had her in her makeshift office. And I cooed and made faces-I mean, that wasn't even an act-and she asked if I wanted to hold her. And I thought, ‘This is perfect,’ right? She'll see me holding her baby, rocking her, she'll have that image in her head now. So later, when I talk about _my_ child, she won't be able to help but imagine her own daughter.

“So I accepted and she handed the baby over, and I looked down at her, and-” Adele slowly took another deep breath. “I just lost it,” she told Sabine, as though she were confessing some personal failing. “All I could see was Adrien, and I just started sobbing hysterically. Why did I think I could get through that? Even before anything awful had ever happened to me, I was still the kind of person who cries at, like, dog food commercials, you know what I mean? Anyway, I was sobbing and begging her to help me. And then the guard hit me-who hits a woman holding a _baby_ -and the doctor grabbed her kid back before I could drop her, and after that I wasn't allowed to talk during check-ups at all, other than to answer direct questions. So that was the end of that. Six months of planning and laying groundwork, out the window.”

“How awful,” Sabine whispered, and before Adele knew it Sabine had pulled her close and started stroking her hair gently. “You poor thing. What a terrible ordeal.”

People had said this kind of thing to Adele all the time in the last four months, obviously, and it wasn’t that it hadn’t been comforting. But the way Sabine was treating her now was just so aggressively _maternal_ , in a way that no one had been towards Adele since she was a teenager. She sighed, almost content. “I actually feel better now, after telling you all that,” she told Sabine, surprised. She held her hand up. “Look at that, I stopped shaking. If you need to go back downstairs-”

“When you’re ready, dear,” Sabine said insistently. Adele nodded, and even though she probably could have handled going back right away, she let Sabine continue to hold her and stroke her hair for a few more minutes.

 

* * *

 

“10… 9… 8…”

The entire family, minus the younger children who had fallen asleep, was gathered together, counting down the final seconds of 2016.

“7… 6… 5…”

Adele glanced over at Adrien and Marinette, standing next to each other at the edge of the group. She could tell they’d be kissing in five seconds, but neither of them had figured that out yet.

“4… 3… 2…”

Adele looked up at Gabriel and grinned, and as the final second came and went he leaned down, she went up on her toes, and they kissed. It was a thing so full of hope and joy it felt almost defiant. So much of the past year had been hell, but it was also the year Adele had gotten her life back. She was reclaiming it one day at a time, one laugh at a time, one kiss at a time. Now it was a new year, a better year. Every year was going to be a better year from now on.


	5. Hecate's Attic

Jonathan Dumas spent four straight months researching geasa. He threw himself into the project wholeheartedly. It was slow going at first, because it had been so long since he’d had anything like a research project, but eventually his knowledge and skills came back to him. Having something to focus on, something other than how completely and utterly he’d messed everything up, something he was actually _good_ at, was a godsend. When he’d made the offer, to break Adele’s geis, he hadn’t really let himself expect to succeed, but now it looked like he’d actually be pulling it off.

By the end of four months, however, he’d gotten as far as books alone could take him. It was much, much farther than he’d dared hoped, but still-if he wanted to get any closer to breaking his sister’s geis, he’d reached the point where he needed to actually interact with another human being.

Jonathan had been good at that, once. Several lifetimes ago, anyway.

Now he stood in front of a little shop in Paris, near the edge of the city, down a small side street. _Hecate’s Attic_ , it was called. By all outward appearances, it was a perfectly ordinary occult shop. Cheap quartz crystals covered a velvet cloth in the window, alongside Tarot decks, dream catchers, and the like. The shop itself was filled with books, incense, jewelry and all manner of harmless trinkets. If you wanted the stuff that actually worked, you wouldn’t find it out for anyone to buy. You had to know what to ask for, and who to ask.

Jonathan stepped inside, and the little bell over the door gently announced his presence. The unique musky smell of the place hit him all at once, bringing him back to an earlier time.

The last time he’d been in here was about four and a half years ago-Adele had just disappeared, Gabriel had completely failed her, and Jonathan had spent a week or two frantically pulling every string, calling in every favor, tapping every resource he could think of, desperately trying to find some way of tracking his sister. The last time he’d been in here, he’d stormed out in a fury after declaring everyone in the city utterly useless, right before booking a flight to Tibet to look for Adele himself.

Strangely, though, the smell of the place didn’t bring him back to that time. It brought him much, much further back than that-back to the late 90s, to when Adele and Gabriel were active superheroes together. Back when they were asking Jonathan for advice on every supernatural issue that arose, back when Jonathan was coming into this shop on a regular basis for the key spells or supplies that would take down whatever the crisis of the month was.

Jonathan moved through the shop slowly, avoiding the line of sight of its owner for now. He walked between a pair of bookshelves, trailing his fingers over the spines of the volumes. He let the memories, the sensation of the place, wash over him.

“Anything I can help you with?” a familiar voice called over. Sighing and bracing himself, Jonathan stepped out from behind the bookcase.

“Hi, Sal,” he said quietly. Michael Salvatore, the shop’s sole proprietor, stared at him like he was looking at a ghost. Then his face split in a wide grin and he ran around the counter, throwing his arms around Jonathan before he realized what was happening.

“Jonathan!” he exclaimed joyfully. “Holy shit, I haven’t seen you in, what, five years almost?” He laughed, and didn’t seem to notice that Jonathan wasn’t hugging him back. “Never thought I’d see you again, that’s for sure. How the hell have you been?” He took a step back and looked Jonathan up and down. “Jesus, you aged terribly.”

“Thanks, Sal,” Jonathan said flatly. He honestly hadn’t been expecting this reception, and he had no idea what to do with it. “Look, I, uh, don’t have all day,” this was a lie, “and I need a ton of stuff, so if you could take a look at this list and let me know-” Sal waved the list away impatiently.

“We’re not catching up first?” he asked. “Come on, at least tell me if you ever found that sister of yours.”

Jonathan raised an eyebrow. “Do you watch the news at all?” he asked.

“Oh, I know she’s _back_ , obviously,” Sal said. “I mean did _you_ find her?”

“No,” Jonathan said sharply. “The FBI found her.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Sal said impatiently, “I heard the official story. But we’ve been friends for twenty years, so just between you and me, you had _something_ to do with it, right?”

Jonathan took a deep breath. “I did not,” he said slowly, “and I really don’t have time for this. Can you just look at the list?”

“Fine, fine.” Sal took the list from Jonathan and scanned it. After a few seconds he let out a low whistle and looked up. “Jesus, you’re really hitting the ground running here, aren’t you? What the hell is all this stuff for?”

“I thought you had a strict policy against asking customers nosy questions,” Jonathan said. Sal scoffed.

“You’re not a _customer_ ,” he said. “You’re a friend.”

“Really? So I can have all this for free?” Sal laughed loudly at this, then took a second look at the list.

“Wait. Are you breaking a _geis_?” he asked, somewhat incredulously.

“None of your business,” Jonathan snapped.

“Is it on your sister?” Sal asked, unfazed.

“Jesus Christ, Sal, can you get what I need or not?” Dear God, had other people always been this _annoying_? Jonathan knew for a fact that he’d liked Sal once, but for the life of him he couldn’t remember why.

“Yeah… well, I’m not sure about some of these things, they’re pretty-” Sal stopped talking as the bell above the front door rang again, and a middle-aged man entered, heading straight for the counter. “Hold on, I’ll just take care of this guy real quick, and then I’ll see what I can do for you, okay?” Sal walked back around the back of the counter. “Can I help you?”

“Yeah, the guy on the phone said my order was ready to pick up,” the man said.

“That would have been me,” Sal said cheerfully. “What’s the name?”

“Benavente. Ferd. Or, uh, Ferdinand, maybe.”

“Sure,” Sal said. “Hold on one sec.” He exited through a curtain behind the counter, where he kept all the stuff that actually did anything. Once he’d disappeared, the customer looked over at Jonathan and flashed him a quick, friendly smile. Jonathan nodded back, not having worked his way up to smiling in public yet. The customer-Ferd, apparently-looked to be about Jonathan’s age, but that seemed to be where the similarities ended. His features were dark-especially his eyes, which were almost black, but they managed to be warm and friendly all the same. The man looked entirely too excited to be there, actually; Jonathan had the distinct impression that whatever he was doing, this was his first foray into the supernatural.

“Got it,” Sal said, reappearing with a small parcel. “Chrysoprase lodestone, right?”

“Yep,” Ferd replied, taking the package.

“Great, that’ll be-”

“Hold on,” Jonathan interrupted. He looked right at Ferd, a not-insignificant part of himself wondering why on Earth he was bothering. “What do you want with something like that?”

Sal raised an eyebrow. “I thought we weren't supposed to ask the customers questions,” he said, slightly annoyed.

“Oh, I don't mind,” Ferd said. “Someone hexed my parents’ B&B in La Mancha, so they asked me to-”

“A _hex_?” Jonathan interrupted, incredulous. “A run-of-the-mill business hex?”

Ferd shrugged. “Far as I know,” he said.

“This’ll get the job done for that,” Sal said defensively.

“Sure,” Jonathan agreed, “and if you’ve got an aphid infestation in your garden, technically firebombing your property will get _that_ job done.” Ferd blinked, then placed the parcel back down on the counter very, very carefully. Sal raised an eyebrow at Jonathan.

“I see you haven’t gotten any less dramatic in five years. You know they're perfectly safe in the hands of an experienced-”

“Does he look experienced to you?” Jonathan turned back to Ferd, who seemed unperturbed by the insult. “Have you ever, in your entire life, had anything to do with the supernatural before?” he asked.

“Nope,” Ferd said, sounding almost cheerful about it. “Well, unless being akumatized a year and a half ago counts,” he added, laughing a little. He stopped when he noticed Jonathan’s look of barely concealed shock. “Oh, shit,” he said, the laughter gone from his voice, “that bastard got you too, huh? Sorry, sorry. I usually know better than to be flip about it to strangers.” He grinned apologetically. “My therapist says it's a coping mechanism.”

Well, _fuck_.

“Look,” Jonathan said after a brief internal struggle, “breaking a business hex is really easy. Why don't you let me help you, no charge, I'll have it off in a week without any collateral damage.”

Ferd’s eyes widened. “Wow, really?”

“Yeah, _really_?” Sal asked, now straight-up pissed. “That’s pretty off-brand for you, Jonathan. What’s your angle?”

Jonathan glared at Sal. “I need a reason to help somebody now? Fine. I'm bored, he's cute, I'm in the mood to see some windmills. There’s three reasons, pick your favorite.”

“I'm what?”

“You know,” Sal said, “I'm happy to make allowances every now and then for you, seeing as you're a friend, even if you haven't been around for a really long time. But I can't run a business if you're going to be scaring off all my customers and doing free work-”

“Oh, just add the damn stone to my tab,” Jonathan snapped. “We both know you're going to bleed me dry for all the stuff I’m looking for anyway, what's another two hundred Euro?”

“I thought they were three hundred,” Ferd said. Jonathan rolled his eyes at Sal.

“Look, you haven't been around in over five years,” Sal said defensively, “and my rates went up.”

“Two fifty.”

Sal grinned. “In that case, feel free to come by stealing customers whenever the mood strikes.”

“Will do. So now that that’s settled, what about the stuff I need?”

Sal looked back at the list. “Come back in a month,” he finally said.

“Great.” Jonathan turned around and quickly walked out of the store, before realizing he hadn’t gotten any contact info for the man he’d just, quite inexplicably, insisted on helping. Fortunately, Ferd exited about fifteen seconds later.

“Thanks for all your help in there,” he said. “So how much do I owe you for the-”

“Nothing,” Jonathan interrupted. Ferd raised an eyebrow.

“Look, I really appreciate you looking out for me, but I feel bad that you spent so much on something you didn't even need.”

“Don't worry about it, I'm sure I'll find some use for it,” Jonathan lied.

“Okay… well, what do I owe you for-”

“ _Nothing_ ,” Jonathan repeated, somewhat annoyed this time.

“Really? Even if breaking a hex is as easy as you say it is, you're still traveling all the way to Spain.”

“It's fine-look, you're practically doing me a favor here,” Jonathan told him. “The thing I'm about to do, that I'm buying stuff from Sal for, it's really advanced. Probably more advanced than anything I've ever done. And I've been out of the game for a really long time. So this’ll be a good warm-up.”

Ferd shrugged. “Well, okay,” he said, “I never argue too hard when someone wants to do something nice for me. When are you free to head down?”

“Whenever, I don't have anything going on.”

“Oh. Between jobs?”

Jonathan blinked. “Yeah, I guess you could put it like that,” he said.

“Well, I'm a history professor down at the university,” Ferd said, “so I've got classes through Thursday. I already bought a train ticket, I was planning to head down Friday and make a three-day weekend out of it. Does that works for you?”

“Sure.” Jonathan reached into his bag and pulled out a pen and a small notepad. “Here’s my number, in case your plans change before then,” he said, scrawling it alongside his name before ripping the page off and handing it over. Before he realized what was happening, Ferd had grabbed the notepad and pen out of his hand, written his own number down, and handed it back.

“See you Friday,” Ferd said, grinning at Jonathan before walking off. Jonathan stood where he was, watching the man go. Ferd glanced back and waved before turning a corner and disappearing.

 

* * *

 

For some reason, it didn’t occur to Jonathan until much later that there might be something inherently awkward about spending a twelve-hour train ride with a complete stranger, to say nothing of an entire three-day weekend. Guilt might have been a useful motivator for doing a good deed, but it certainly wasn’t going to make conversation any easier. And Jonathan was very, _very_ rusty when it came to making conversation.

In the end, Jonathan simply packed every book he had on both hexes and geasa, figuring between the two subjects he could probably just kill seventy-two hours with his head stuck in a book. Ferd, Jonathan was pleased to see, had brought a stack of papers to grade, and got to work silently attacking them with a red pen the moment they were settled in. Jonathan grabbed the most advanced book he had out of his bag and started reading. Within ten minutes, the rest of the world had fallen away.

Jonathan didn’t come out of the zone until almost two hours later. Slowly Jonathan realized he was picking up on a great deal of curiosity nearby, and he finally noticed that Ferd had finished grading and was subtly trying to read over his shoulder. Jonathan looked over at him, and Ferd gave up on trying to be subtle.

“Is that for the hex?” Ferd asked.

“No, this is for breaking a geis,” Jonathan said. Ferd’s eyes widened.

“Like Cú Chulainn?” he asked. It took Jonathan a second to place the reference.

“Oh… yeah, pretty similar,” he said. “In real life the application is a bit more, uh, complicated, I guess. I’ve never actually broken one before. I mean, they’re supposed to be unbreakable. But it’s been done before, so hopefully I’ll be able to replicate that.”

“Wow,” Ferd said. “Have you done anything like that before?”

“Nothing this advanced,” Jonathan admitted. “But I used to get into a lot of stuff like this, once. It’s, uh, been a really long time, though. It’s funny, I’d completely forgotten how much I enjoyed it.”

“Magic?”

“Research. There’s something… I don’t know, relaxing about it, almost. You start with a problem, and you’ve got a world of information that you have to make your way through, like a maze, and everything else kind of fades into the background-and if you’re clever enough, and persistent enough, it doesn’t matter that you can’t cast the actual spells you’re reading about. Solving the puzzle, that’s all there is. It’s meditative.” He glanced at Ferd. “That probably sounded like nonsense, right?”

“It sounded incredibly nerdy,” Ferd said, “but you’re talking to a guy who spent five years getting a PhD in French History, so either I’m a total masochist or I know exactly what you mean.” He paused. “Although being a total masochist was actually a prerequisite for admittance into the program, so…”

Jonathan laughed. It was such a shock, to discover he was still capable of that.

“If you don’t mind my asking,” Jonathan said, because clearly his plan of avoiding conversation was a failure anyway, “why did your parents ask you to look into breaking their hex, when you live all the way in Paris?”

“Oh. It’s kind of a weird story, actually,” Ferd said. “I don’t understand half of it, but… well, basically, my grandfather died about a year ago, and right before he died he told my dad that a, uh… what did he call it… an “affinity for runic magic” ran in the family.”

“Really?” Jonathan said, impressed. “That’s rare.”

“Yeah, that’s what he said. He said it skips a generation. He’s got it, my dad doesn’t, me and my sisters all do. So when this hex thing happened, my parents thought one of us might be in a better position than them to look into fixing it. But my sisters are all married with like four kids each, so none of them had time, and I thought it sounded pretty interesting anyway, so I volunteered. It’s still this big mystery, though, why my grandfather kept it from everyone. He said he didn’t want any of us getting involved in any of it, but he wouldn’t say why.”

“Oh,” Jonathan said. “That’s… not that uncommon, actually.” Ferd cocked his head, so Jonathan continued. “That is… people who have magic, they’re a lot more likely to see how it can go wrong. They’re a lot more likely to have it go wrong in a very personal way, too. So a lot of the time, they see something like that one too many times, and they just decide magic itself is the problem, and they try to shut it out of their lives completely.”

Ferd nodded. “That’s sad,” he said. “Makes sense, though.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Jonathan said, looking down. “But you shouldn’t be scared of it. It’s a gift.”

Ferd smiled. “Yeah, I wouldn’t mind learning more about it. So can I use it to help with this hex thing?”

“Well, no, I’m afraid not,” Jonathan said. “Hexes aren’t runic. Runic magic is a really old European magic, and hexes are-well, technically proto-hexes are Germanic, but modern hexes are American, they were developed by the Pennsylvania Dutch back in the mid-nineteenth century, and they’re not… sorry, is this really boring?”

Ferd raised an eyebrow. “I’m a history professor, remember? Keep going.”

“Oh, right… well, I don’t actually know much more history than that, but hexes are ubiquitous now, just because they’re so easy to cast. Cheap, too. But that makes them easy to break, luckily for your parents.”

Ferd nodded. “Well, sorry I can’t help,” he said. “Too bad it’s not a genetic affinity for hexes.”

“Are you kidding?” Jonathan asked. “Runic magic is way better. It’s much harder to master, but it’s some of the most powerful magic out there. The geis I’m trying to break is runic, actually. It’s a powerhouse of a discipline.”

“Your geis is runic?” Ferd asked, interested. “So… does that mean I could help you break it?”

“What? Oh, no, no, that’s not necessary,” Jonathan said in a rush.

“I thought you said you couldn’t cast stuff yourself,” Ferd said. “You said you could just do the research. Won’t you need someone to do actual spells at some point?”

“Well, yes,” Jonathan admitted. “But I know where to find people I can hire for that stuff-”

“Hire?” Ferd asked. “You’re going to pay someone to do something I could do for free? After you’re helping me out with my thing for free?”

“... Yes?”

“Absolutely not,” Ferd said, indignant. “You’re helping me with my thing, I’m helping you with yours. End of story.”

Jonathan wracked his brain, and found he was completely and utterly unable to come up with any counter-argument whatsoever. “Yeah, okay,” he finally said. “Thanks.”

Ferd grinned. “No problem, it’ll probably be the most interesting thing I ever do in my life.”


	6. Breaking

Adele was woken up early one morning in March by her phone buzzing insistently on her bedside table. Yawning, she grabbed it and looked at the caller ID. She nearly dropped the phone on her face when she saw her brother’s name. She glanced over at her husband, making sure he'd slept through everything, before quickly getting up and leaving their room. She shut herself in a small library a few doors down before answering.

“Jonathan?”

“Hi, Adele. Are you free this afternoon?”

“For what?”

“Breaking that geis, what else?”

Adele took a moment to process what he'd said. “ _Today_?”

“If that doesn't work I can do it tomorrow, or-”

“No, no, no,” Adele interrupted frantically. “I want this thing off as soon as possible. I just… I'm surprised, that's all. I haven't heard from you in, what, five months?”

“I don't think that's a bad turnaround time,” Jonathan said defensively, “for something that’s supposed to be impossible.”

“That's not what I meant at all,” Adele said, annoyed. “I just… I didn't hear from you. I assumed you'd hit a dead end. I figured you'd tell me if you’d made progress.”

“You were very clear, the last time we spoke, about how much you wanted to hear from me,” Jonathan said, only a touch bitterly. “I assumed you wouldn't want status updates. Besides, I didn't want to get your hopes up until I was sure I could do it. Now I am. I finally got the last of what I needed yesterday. I just need a few more hours to set everything up. I'll text you my address. It won't be ready before four.”

“Okay, I… I guess I'll see you then.”

“Great,” Jonathan said curtly, hanging up before Adele could respond. She stared at her phone for a moment, still in shock, before sinking down into a nearby armchair. She checked the time. It wasn't quite seven yet. She glanced at the back of her right hand.

Nine hours. Nine more hours, and then she'd be free of this curse, of the final piece of her captivity hanging over her, casting a shadow on everything she'd experienced since escaping, since returning home.

Sighing, she left the library and slowly returned to her bedroom. Gabriel hadn’t woken up. Adele got back under the covers and curled up next to him, but she knew she couldn’t fall back asleep now.

 

* * *

 

Adele did her best to wait until four. Yesterday the geis had been almost nothing to her, a minor inconvenience she’d almost completely learned to manage. She could go hours without thinking about it. But now, knowing she was so close to being rid of it, waiting was torture.

Adele finally broke down a couple of hours early, and entered her brother’s apartment building at about a quarter after two. He wouldn’t be ready yet, but she didn’t care. And maybe it would be awkward, her showing up early, but whatever, he’d shown up unexpectedly last October and turnabout was fair play. She wanted to make sure she was there the second Jonathan was ready to break it, even if it was only a minute earlier than he’d estimated.

Adele made her way to the apartment number Jonathan had given her, took a deep breath, braced herself, and knocked on the door. She could hear footsteps, and in the half-second before the door opened she realized there was no possible way the emotional signature on the other side belonged to her brother.

“That was fast, did you-oh. Can I help you?” the man who answered the door asked. He had the barest hint of a Spanish accent, dark and kind eyes, and an openness that Adele, as an empath, found almost disarming.

“Sorry,” Adele said, pulling out her phone and looking through it, “I must have gotten the-no, this is definitely the address I was given.” She frowned.

“Are you Jonathan's sister?” Adele looked up at the man and narrowed her eyes.

“Who are you?” she asked, guarded.

“Oh, sorry.” He held his hand out for her to shake. “Ferdinand Benavente. Ferd. I'm helping Jonathan set up some of the runic stuff for your, uh, issue.” He stepped aside and let her enter the apartment. “Jonathan should be back soon,” he said, as he closed the door behind them. “We thought we had everything-and we've got all the crazy rare stuff we need-but then ten minutes ago we realized he's out of salt. Salt! I mean, you just assume you've got it, you know? I've never run out of salt in my life, I think.”

“Uh huh,” Adele said slowly.

“I'm really psyched I get to meet you, actually, Jonathan said you wouldn't be able to make it until much later.”

“Did he? That's… interesting.”

“Yeah, and I have a review session to lead at four so I figured we'd be, you know, ships in the night, but-oh my God, you're Adele Agreste.”

Adele blinked. She’d mostly stopped getting that reaction from people by now. “Jonathan didn't mention that?”

“No, he's barely said two words about you. Not in a bad way or anything, I think he's just trying to be discreet. He only said you've got a geis that needs breaking, he didn't even say what it did. Not that it's any of my business,” Ferd added quickly.

“And… how do you know him, exactly?”

“Well, we ran into each other about a month or so ago, and Jonathan saved me from getting in over my head on some magic stuff. And then he offered to help me break this hex on my parents’ business.”

“Oh,” Adele said. “In exchange for your help with this?”

“Nah, he insisted on doing it for nothing, but he let it slip that he needed some runic stuff and I’ve got a genetic affinity for it, so I insisted. But I don't actually know anything about magic, so Jonathan's been walking me through how to do it. It’s really fascinating.”

“Right. So… just to be clear, Jonathan was helping you for free?”

“Is that unusual for him?”

“Um. I… wouldn't want to say that, no.”

“You wouldn't _want_ to say it?” Ferd cocked his head slightly to the side. “Does that geis, like, make you answer questions in a really wishy-washy way or something?”

Adele burst out laughing. “Kind of, actually,” she said. “It keeps me from lying.”

“Oh, wow. Yeah, I can see how that would be inconvenient for a spy.”

“I'm not a spy,” Adele said, still grinning.

“Like I said, it's none of my-shoot, where are my manners, do you want any coffee?” Ferd asked.

“God, yes.”

 

* * *

 

When Jonathan got back, about twenty minutes later, he could hear the sounds of laughter coming from his apartment all the way down the hall.

“… so then Carmen’s oldest, Ximena, she got fed up and challenged Jonathan to a riddle contest, which he was actually doing pretty well at until she switched to riddles that are just puns in Spanish, and-oh, you're back! Look, your sister made it after all, isn't that great?”

Adele looked up at her brother, who was still standing in the doorway looking shocked. “Hi, Jonathan,” she said softly. “You… you're looking good.”

He blinked. “Thanks.” He closed the door behind him and started to take off his coat and scarf.

“Ferd was just telling me about your trip to Spain. Sounds like you had a lot of fun.”

“Yeah, sure, it was great,” he said vaguely. “Um-I'm not quite ready yet, I still need to set a lot of things up-”

“I don't mind waiting.” Adele looked at his bag. “Get the salt?”

“Huh? Oh, yeah. And, um,” he pulled out a bottle of aspirin. “You might want to take a couple of these. Not sure how much they’ll help but…” he sighed. “I probably should have mentioned this on the phone, but breaking the geis is going to be kind of, well, violent. It’ll probably break your hand. Is that okay?”

Adele’s eyes widened in mock horror. “Oh no, a broken hand? Has anything more horrible than that ever happened to anyone ever?” She rolled her eyes. “Yes, Jonathan, it’s okay, I’m pretty sure I can handle a broken hand.”

“Great.” He tossed her the bottle. “I need to attune some stones in the kitchen with this,” he held up the salt, “so Ferd, you want to walk her through it?”

“Sure,” Ferd said, and Jonathan left. Ferd turned to Adele. “Okay, so everything’s gonna happen over here,” he said, getting up and walking over to a circular wooden table in the corner. “Jonathan’s set up almost all of it already. I'll draw the runic circle here, right, which is pretty much the beginning and end of what you guys need me for. And your brother will do the rest. All you need to do is put your right hand at the center of the circle, palm down.”

“Like this?” Adele asked, placing her hand on the table where Ferd had indicated.

“Yeah, perfect,” he said. “Although… well, Jonathan said it's important you don't move, and it's going to hurt. I wonder if we should try to find a way to, I don't know, tie your hand down or something without disrupting the circle.” Ferd frowned at the surface of the table.

“Could you just hold it down?” Adele asked. “Since you’ll be done by then? Or would that interfere with the spell?”

“Hm. Maybe.” Ferd reached over, placing his hand over Adele’s wrist, and firmly pinned it down to the table.

Adele immediately screamed and punched him in the face as hard as she could.

Jonathan came running. By the time he reached the living room, Adele was sitting on his couch, shaking and hyperventilating. Ferd was sitting next to her, one hand rubbing her back, and he was talking to her in a low, soothing voice, trying to get her to slow her breathing down.

“In… and out… good, and in…”

Adele recovered enough to speak. “I am so sorry-”

“Nope,” Ferd interrupted gently, “we’re not apologizing now, we’re just breathing.” Adele nodded. Ferd shot Jonathan an apologetic look, and he noticed a black eye forming. Jonathan approached his sister hesitantly-waves of panic were rolling off of her, crashing violently into Jonathan’s mind, and he wasn't sure if his presence would make things worse for her. But to Jonathan’s surprise she seemed to find him comforting, so he walked over to the couch and sat on her other side. She leaned against him, still shaking, and continued to focus on regulating her breathing for the next few minutes.

“God,” she finally said, “I'm so embarrassed. I had no idea that would happen, or I never would have suggested-”

“Don't worry about it,” Ferd said. “Feeling better?” Adele nodded.

“Yeah, I just, um… no one’s held my wrist like that since I got this thing, I guess.” She took a deep breath. “I'm gonna lie down, I think.” She pointed to a door on the other side of the room. “Is that the bedroom?” Jonathan nodded, and Adele stood up and walked away without another word. Jonathan stared at the closed door for a few moments, unmoving, before Ferd broke the silence.

“She’s been through a lot, huh?”

Jonathan nodded. “Yeah.” That cold rage was starting to come back, the one he’d felt when he’d first seen the tattoo on the back of his sister’s hand. When he’d understood what it meant, what she must have gone through in the getting of it. He took a breath and tried to clear his mind. Jonathan wasn’t sure if Adele could pick up on his feelings from the other room; he couldn’t feel hers from that distance, but she’d held the Butterfly Miraculous a lot longer than he had, and he didn’t want to make things worse by burdening her with his own emotions. “You, um, you handled that very well,” he said to Ferd, and his anger receded.

“Oh, well,” Ferd said, “I’m no stranger to panic attacks. There’s always one or two right before final exams.” He touched the side of his face lightly. “The left hook is new, though,” he said teasingly.

“Oh, jeez,” Jonathan said, getting up, “let me get you some ice for that.”

 

* * *

 

An hour later, everything was ready. Adele reappeared just as Ferd was finishing the circle, and Jonathan was laying out five black stones around its edge. He looked up as she approached the table. “Nice timing.”

“It’s ready?”

“Yeah,” he said, placing the last stone.

“How long will it take?” Adele asked, looking at the complicated set-up before her.

“Not long at all, actually.”

Adele glanced at the back of her hand. “Getting it took hours,” she said without thinking. She caught another flash of anger from her brother, but to her surprise he shook it off quickly.

“Yeah, well, lucky for us breaking something is a lot faster and easier than forging it,” Jonathan said. “It’s, like, the difference between knitting a sweater and unravelling one into a pile of yarn.” He hesitated. “It’s going to hurt, though.”

“I figured that out when you told me it would break my hand, Jonathan.”

Jonathan shook his head. “No, it’s going to hurt a lot more than that. Not for long, but-”

“It’s fine,” Adele interrupted impatiently, “I just want it off.”

Jonathan nodded. “Okay, then. So basically what we’ve done here is created a localized containment field and put it in a state of low dormancy in order to-” Adele raised an eyebrow at him and he sighed in defeat. “Fine. Long story short, you put your hand in the circle, I flip the stones over one by one, ten seconds later the geis is broken. Whole thing should take less than a minute.”

Adele blinked. “It’s really that simple?”

“No, it’s incredibly complicated, but you don’t want to hear all the cool technical details, so don’t worry about it. Just-once I start, you can’t take your hand out of the circle, okay? And I mean it, it’s going to hurt. A lot.”

In response, Adele slammed her hand down in the center of the circle, locked her elbow, and leaned all her weight on it. “Do it,” she said. Her brother nodded, and flipped the first stone. The back of Adele’s hand started to itch uncomfortably, but she ignored it. Jonathan counted to ten under his breath, then flipped the second one. The itching became outright painful, but it was still nothing Adele couldn’t handle. Another ten seconds, and then the third stone-and now tears were beginning to form at the corners of Adele’s eyes, but she clenched her jaw and didn’t move.

At the fourth stone, her elbow and her knees buckled, but she managed to stay standing and she grabbed her right arm with her left hand, steadying it, keeping it where it was.

She didn’t cry out until the fifth stone. The pain was blinding,  it was everywhere, her legs fell out from under her, there was nothing else in the world but that pain, her hand was breaking, _she had to keep her hand where it was_ -

And it was over.

Adele took a deep breath. Jonathan and Ferd were both watching her intently. Ferd offered her a hand and helped her to her feet. Adele winced as she raised her right hand from the table.

“Does it still hurt?” Jonathan asked.

“No, Jonathan, having a broken hand feels _wonderful_ ,” Adele snapped without thinking. A second later her annoyed expression gave way to shock. “Oh my God, I did it, I lied.” She looked at her hand, and saw that all traces of the geis had vanished. “Two plus two is five.” She let out an excited laugh, and hopped up and down a little.

“Is it weird that I’m finding this adorable?” Ferd asked. Adele turned to him and abruptly threw her left arm around him, hugging him tightly.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you! Oh, you don’t know what it means to finally be free of this thing!” She sighed happily.

“Oh, I barely did anything,” Ferd said modestly, hugging her back. “Jonathan did all the real work.”

Adele turned around to face her brother, who was watching her silently, hesitantly. After a moment she walked over to him. For a second Jonathan thought she might hug him too, but she held back and just looked up at him. “Thank you,” she said softly, sincerely. Jonathan nodded.

“Of course,” he said.

Adele sighed. “Well, I guess I’d better get myself to the hospital and get this broken hand taken care of. But I really do appreciate-”

“Excuse me?” Jonathan interrupted. “How were you planning on getting to the hospital, out of curiosity?”

“Well, I drove here, so-”

“Oh my God, Adele, you are not driving yourself to the hospital with a broken hand. Jesus Christ, this is you having Adrien all over again.” Jonathan looked at Ferd. “You know she tried to drive herself to the hospital in the middle of having a baby?”

“It was hardly in the _middle_ of having him,” Adele said defensively, “and I’m perfectly capable of driving with one hand.”

“I’m driving you. End of story.”

Adele rolled her eyes. “Fine.” She looked at Ferd. “You’re welcome to tag along, if you want.”

Ferd glanced at his watch. “Nah, I’m running late for that review session. But it was really nice meeting you.”

“You, too,” Adele said, as Ferd grabbed his coat and left, waving on his way out of the apartment. Adele hadn’t quite appreciated what a nice buffer Ferd had been until she was alone again with her brother. There was an awkward silence for a few moments, and then Jonathan sighed and grabbed his coat.

“Let’s go,” he said.

 

* * *

 

Traffic was terrible, because of course it was. The two of them spent the first fifteen minutes of the ride in total silence, Adele leaning against her good hand and looking out the window, before speaking.

“You seem… better,” Adele said, not looking at her brother. “Emotionally.”

“Thanks.” He drummed his fingers on the wheel nervously. “Researching the geis helped a lot, actually. It was good to have something productive to do. It, you know, it’s been a while.”

“Right.”

“How, um, how have you been?” Jonathan asked. Adele could tell he wasn’t sure if this was crossing a line or not.

“Fine.”

“Really?”

Adele shrugged. “Mostly. Anyway, now that the geis is gone I can finally put the whole thing behind me. It’s over.” Jonathan didn’t say anything, but Adele caught a flash of skepticism and she turned to look at him. “What?” she asked defensively.

“Nothing, just… that geis isn’t why you punched Ferd in the face.”

Adele’s cheeks flushed. “I apologized for that, I feel awful about it.”

“I don’t want you to feel awful. I’m just worried, that’s all. What if it hadn’t been Ferd? What if it had been Adrien that grabbed your wrist unexpectedly?” Adele felt more guilt at that question than Jonathan had been expecting, and he glanced at her. “Or did that already happen?”

“No! God, no, nothing like that has happened to Adrien.” She paused. “But I get nightmares. Sometimes… sometimes I wind up punching Gabriel, before I’m fully awake.” She glared at her brother. “You are entirely too happy about that, it’s very annoying.”

“Sorry,” he said. “Are you seeing anyone about it?” Adele didn’t answer, but she didn’t have to. “Seriously? After everything you’ve been through?”

“I don’t need mental health advice from _you_ of all people,” Adele snapped. “Anyway, I can’t talk about 90% of it, so what would be the point?”

“Jesus, just find someone trustworthy. You of all people ought to be able to figure out who you can safely reveal everything to. Look, far be it from me to recommend a course of action that leads to Gabriel fucking Agreste getting punched _less_ often, but… you really need to see someone.”

Adele rolled her eyes, annoyed. “Fine,” she said. There was another long pause. “So… Ferd seems nice.”

“That is an understatement,” Jonathan replied matter-of-factly.

“So when are you asking him out?” Jonathan didn’t say anything, but his shock at the question was obvious. “What?”

“I… Adele, the last time I saw you, you made it very clear you didn’t want any kind of a relationship with me anymore. I was sure that if it hadn’t been for the geis, I just never would have seen you again. And I get that, I really do. But now you’re asking how I’m doing, asking personal questions, and that I _don’t_ get. What do you want from me, where do we stand?”

Adele sighed. “I don’t know. I’m still furious with you, I still don’t forgive you for any of it, but… I missed you, too.” She brushed away a tear impatiently. “Maybe that’s crazy, but I did. And despite everything, I’m glad that it looks like you’re starting to put some semblance of a life back together. So… can’t I just ask about it? Without us having to go into everything?”

Slowly, Jonathan nodded. “Okay,” he said. “That’s fair.” He looked at her. “I missed you, too.”

“So tell me about Ferd,” Adele said, and Jonathan’s reaction wasn’t quite the one she’d been expecting.

“He’s great,” Jonathan said curtly, “and I’m not asking him out.”

“Really? That’s new. You usually don’t bother waiting for the other guy to make the first move.”

“I’m not waiting for anything,” Jonathan said. “I’m not dating him.”

“Why not?”

“He’s not interested.” Adele groaned loudly at this. “What?”

“Jonathan, I hate that you’re an empath. I hate every single step in the sequence of events that led to you becoming one, okay? But pretending you aren’t one won’t undo any of those events, so what’s the point? I can tell Ferd’s interested, you can tell he’s interested, I can tell that you can tell he’s interested, you can tell that I can tell that-”

“Oh my God, please stop talking. He-fine, he’s interested. But he wouldn’t be if he knew who I was.”

Adele raised an eyebrow. “Are you _punishing_ yourself?” she asked, incredulous.

“You’re not going to tell me I don’t need to, are you?”

“God, no. I’m just stunned you’re capable of the impulse.”

“I’m really not,” Jonathan said. “I just… I can’t keep a secret like that in a serious relationship, it would be wrong. And it would be a dealbreaker. So what’s the point of starting anything?”

Adele considered this. “Maybe it wouldn’t be,” she said. “Ferd seems pretty forgiving. Hell, I punched him in the face and his first instinct was to comfort me.”

“Yeah, well.” Jonathan drummed his fingers against the wheel again. “Punching him in the face is one thing, akumatizing him is another.” There was a very long silence after this.

“Jesus,” Adele finally said. “So that’s why you volunteered to help him with that hex.” Jonathan didn’t respond. “Well… maybe-”

“Maybe what?” Jonathan interrupted. “You think I haven’t already gone over every possible approach already? At what point in a relationship do you tell someone you’re responsible for the worst day of their life? Third date, fifth date?” He let out a frustrated sigh. “I can’t tell him, and I can’t _not_ tell him, so all that’s left is for us to part ways, and hope that he remembers me fondly when he looks back on all this in the future. Tell me I’m wrong.”

Adele didn’t respond, and again they drove in silence. “Are we almost there?” Adele eventually asked.

“Yeah… another ten minutes, maybe.”

“Okay. I should probably call Gabriel, tell him to meet me.” She pulled her phone out of her purse and dialed, somewhat awkwardly, with her left hand. “Gabriel? Hello, darling. What are you doing right now? Oh. Is it very urgent? No, it’s not a big deal, I just need you to pick me up from the hospital.” Adele rolled her eyes. “Calm down, Gabriel, it’s fine. Calm _down_. I just broke my hand, that’s all. Well, I, uh, went to see my brother-” her expression grew irritated as her husband cut her off. “Stop yelling, it’s not what you-Gabriel just _shut up for one second_. He broke the geis. Well, if he _hadn’t_ , I wouldn’t be able to say he had, would I? Oh, honestly, you’re being very-this is a _good_ thing, can you just be happy about it with me? All right. Thank you. I’ll see you soon.”

Sighing, Adele hung up the phone and tossed it back into her purse, then glared at her brother. “Why’d you have to fuck everything up?” she asked bitterly, before she could stop herself.

“I don’t know,” Jonathan said. “I ask myself that a lot.”

 

* * *

 

Jonathan drove around for hours after dropping Adele off, not going anywhere in particular, just trying to clear his mind. Things were much better between the two of them than he’d dared hope for, but Jonathan didn’t have any delusions about their relationship. He knew it would never again be what it had been. It would probably be months before he even heard from Adele again.

Maybe it didn’t matter, though. He’d finally found some way to help his sister, and that was all he’d ever really wanted.

Jonathan was so wrapped up in his own head that he almost didn’t notice Ferd waiting for him outside his apartment when he finally returned. He was leaning heavily against the door, and looked like he’d been there for for a while. He straightened up as Jonathan approached.

“How’s your sister?” Ferd asked. “I thought I’d come by and make sure everything was alright, but you’re back a lot later than I expected. Is everything okay?”

“Oh, yeah, everything’s fine. She’s fine. I was just… I didn’t know you’d be waiting here, I’m sorry.” Jonathan unlocked his door. “How was your review session?” he asked.

“Great,” Ferd said, following him inside, “although my students were a little distracted by the black eye. I believe it may have garnered me some of what the children these days are calling ‘street cred’.” He smiled proudly. “I declined to mention I got it from a forty-something year old woman half my size, obviously.”

Jonathan grinned despite himself. “Well, I really appreciate your help with that,” he said, as he closed the door behind him. “You really didn’t have to-”

The second he turned back around, Ferd was kissing him. For a second, Jonathan was just shocked-that it was happening at all, that he hadn’t sensed it coming, even as an empath.

And then he was kissing Ferd back, because he knew it was wrong but it felt right, because being around Ferd made him feel like a person again. Because he could feel everything Ferd was feeling and it was _wonderful_ , and knowing he was making Ferd feel that way was wonderful, too. Because it felt so good, to just forget everything and be happy, just for a moment.

Because God knew resisting temptation had never been Jonathan’s strong suit.

Ferd had him pinned against the door-not in an aggressive way, just out of eagerness-so it was difficult for Jonathan to break away, but he finally managed.

“I… I really like you, Ferd,” Jonathan whispered, and Ferd smiled.

“I like you, too,” he said, leaning back in.

“But-” Ferd pulled back. “But I can’t-I, um, things are kind of complicated for me right now, and I wish I could, but-”

Ferd’s face fell, and he took half a step back. “Is this an “It’s Not You, It’s Me” speech?” he asked, and he was keeping his face even but Jonathan could feel how disappointed he was, and it twisted inside of him.

“Um… yeah, I guess it is.”

Ferd nodded. “Well, that sucks,” he said flatly.

“I’m really sorry.”

Ferd shrugged. “It’s fine.” He gave Jonathan a friendly half-smile that only seemed a little forced, and then hugged him. “You’ve got my number, right? Just promise you’ll call when you sort out whatever it is, okay?”

“Sure,” Jonathan said. He hadn’t fully absorbed Ferd’s request, because he couldn’t think straight when Ferd was that close to him. Then Jonathan stepped away from the door, Ferd gave him a tiny wave on his way out, and then he was gone.

Once alone, Jonathan sighed, walked across the room, and sat down heavily on his couch. Leaning back, he looked up at the ceiling and idly wondered if the day would ever come when he didn’t completely hate himself.


	7. Dr. Yvonne Blanchet

Adele entered the small waiting room, more than a little nervous. The only other person currently there was a receptionist, seated behind a desk. “Can I help you?” she asked as Adele approached.

“I was hoping to talk to Dr. Blanchet,” Adele said. The young woman looked up at her.

“Do you have an appointment?” she asked.

“No,” Adele admitted. “This was-that is, I called, and you said-”

“We’re not accepting new patients at this time,” the receptionist interrupted. “You’ll have to make an appointment with another office. I have a list of recommendations here, all local, very highly respected-”

“I’d really, very strongly prefer to talk to Dr. Blanchet,” Adele said. “We went to school together, and-look, can I just speak to her personally for ten minutes?”

“Her schedule’s booked solid today,” the receptionist said. “Which you might have guessed, since you know we’re not accepting new patients right now.”

“Just five minutes, between appointments.”

“I’m afraid not.”

Adele sighed and backed down. She could tell the receptionist was about thirty seconds away from calling building security. “All right,” Adele said. “I understand. I’ll just wait here until she’s done for the day and catch her on her way out.”

The receptionist looked up at the room’s clock and raised an eyebrow. “You’re going to sit here for three hours?” In response, Adele smiled at her, sat down in one of the chairs on the far side of the room and pulled a book out of her purse. The receptionist rolled her eyes and returned to her work.

Three patients came and went in the time that Adele sat there, waiting. While she did her best not to pay attention to them, not wanting to be intrusive, Adele did notice that all three seemed to leave happier than they’d arrived, which was comforting. Finally, though, the last patient of the day left, and about fifteen minutes later Dr. Blanchet exited her office.

“Clarisse, could you reschedule Mr. Thomas’s appointment next week, he’s had a sudden change of-” she stopped talking suddenly, noticing Adele. “I’m sorry, have you been helped?”

“She’s not a patient, I told her we’re not accepting new ones but she refused to-”

“Hi, Yvonne,” Adele interrupted, standing up. “I’m sorry, I know this isn’t very professional or polite, but I needed to-”

“Oh my God, _Adele_? Adele Dumas?” The doctor hurried over to Adele, hugging her immediately. “It’s so good to see you!”

“It's good to see you, too, Yvonne,” Adele said, hugging her back warmly.

“God, I haven't seen you since-which reunion was it? Tenth? Fifteenth?”

“Tenth,” Adele replied. “I, ah, wasn't around for the fifteenth.”

“Oh, God, of course you weren't, I'm so sorry, I wasn't thinking,” Yvonne said, her emotions shifting instantly from joy to mortification. “What, um,” she recovered quickly, “what brings you in today?”

“I-” Adele glanced over Yvonne’s shoulder at the receptionist, who was clearly displeased that Adele was being received so warmly. “Could we discuss it privately?”

“Of course, of course.” Yvonne turned around. “You can go for the day, Clarisse, I can lock up tonight.”

Clarisse looked like she wanted to object for a moment, then shrugged and grabbed her purse. “See you tomorrow, Dr. Blanchet,” she said on her way out of the waiting room. Yvonne turned back to Adele and motioned for her to follow, walking back into her office.

“So… what can I do for you, Adele?” Yvonne asked, once the two were seated comfortably across from one another, Adele on a small couch and the doctor in a comfortable looking chair.

“Well…” she sighed. “I’ve been doing pretty well, since getting back,” she said, a touch defensively. “I mean, relatively. But I could be doing better. And my brother pointed out the other day that I’d been through a lot and it would probably be a good idea to find somebody to talk to about it.”

“Your brother sounds like a smart man,” Yvonne said. Adele snorted audibly.

“Sorry,” Adele said quickly, in response to the doctor’s shocked expression, “that’s just… that might seem funny to you in a bit.” She considered this. “Or not, I guess. Anyway. I didn’t want to go to just anybody, because it’s, I mean, you could probably guess that a lot of it is… Okay, it’s not all _officially_ classified, but almost all of it’s just really sensitive stuff, right? And I wasn’t really sure who I’d feel comfortable with, and then I remembered you from our study groups when we were getting our psychology degrees together, and you always seemed very intelligent and trustworthy. And I know we weren’t friends really, but I thought that might actually be a good thing, it might help keep this professional.” Adele was talking faster now, though she didn’t realize it. “And I know you’re not accepting new patients-I’d be happy to pay extra for the inconvenience, if that’s the issue-but if I’m crossing a line by asking let me know and I’ll leave and find somebody else, no hard feelings, I promise.”

Slowly, Yvonne nodded. “I see,” she said. She considered this for a moment. “I must admit, a part of me is tempted to accept just to hear the whole story.” Adele nodded. She could tell this already, of course, but it meant a lot that Yvonne had said it upfront. “I’m sure it’s fascinating. But that’s not really a good reason to take you on.” She paused again. “Are you sure I’m the psychiatrist you want to see? I don’t know your whole story, of course, but from what little I’ve heard from the news I know I’ve never had a patient like you before. Maybe you’d prefer someone more experienced with this sort of thing?”

“If you learn my whole story,” Adele replied, “you’ll realize nobody’s had a patient quite like me before. So it might as well be you. And I trust you.”

Yvonne nodded. “All right then,” she said, “in that case, I’d be happy to take you on as a patient. When were you hoping to start?”

“Oh, as soon as possible,” Adele said. “And I don’t have much of a schedule to speak of, so any time you have available would be fine.”

“Well, I am booked solid through the next three months,” Yvonne said, and Adele’s face fell. “I’m sure I can move some things around, but in the meantime,” Yvonne glanced at her watch, then looked back at Adele, “are you free now?”

“Now? Oh, I couldn’t keep you that late, you must be eager to get back home.”

“Not really,” Yvonne said. “Not as eager as I am to stay and listen to everything. If it’s too late for you, that’s perfectly understandable and I’ll let you know if I can clear some time within the next two weeks or so, but if you don’t mind staying I certainly don’t.”

Adele nodded, then reached for her purse. “Let me just text my husband, he gets worried when he doesn’t know where I am.”

“I can only imagine,” Yvonne said, and Adele smiled as she sent the text and dropped the phone back in her bag. Yvonne picked up a notepad and a pen, and Adele frowned.

“Do you have to take notes?” she asked. “I’m sure your office is very secure, but it might not be safe.”

“Hmm. I really would prefer to be taking notes, it helps me remember everything and put things together when responding, but… what if I shredded them after each session?” Adele nodded after a moment. “Excellent.” She leaned back in her chair and waited patiently. Adele took a breath.

“Do you, um, remember what I was like back in college?” Adele asked.

“Sure,” Yvonne said. “Smart, organized, determined.” She smiled. “A bit of a temper.”

“Anything else? Less flattering, perhaps?”

Yvonne paused. “You were a bit… flaky,” she admitted. Adele nodded.

“Right, I was,” she agreed. “I missed a lot of study sessions, classes, tests. And that’s because I was busy moonlighting as the superhero Butterfly. See, back in 1995 I-”

“Wait.” Yvonne’s eyes were wide, and she held up a finger to pause Adele’s story. She held it up for about thirty seconds before dropping it. “Alright,” she said. “That… that actually explains quite a lot. Please continue.” Smiling, Adele continued her story.

 

* * *

 

“… and then Henrik started trying to get under my skin by claiming he’d found Paon and was working out some kind of deal with him for my release, which of course he wasn’t. I mean, he didn’t even know who Paon was. Gabriel was his first suspect, obviously, but by the time Henrik had a chance to investigate, Gabriel had rejected his Miraculous and Henrik can’t track them when they’re dormant. Anyway, I could tell he was lying but instead of just keeping my mouth shut I had to throw it in his face like an _idiot_ , and, well, once he found out I was a human lie detector that was it, he-Good Lord, is that the time?” Adele looked up suddenly at the room’s clock, and saw she’d been talking for seventy minutes straight.

“Hmm?” Yvonne followed Adele’s gaze. “Oh, that’s fine,” she said, “I don’t have anywhere to be tonight.”

“I really hate to keep you-”

“Adele,” Yvonne interrupted, her expression dead serious, “this may be somewhat unprofessional, and of course you’re free to leave anytime you like, but I _really_ want to hear the end of this.”

“Oh… well, if you insist. Where was I? Right, so I let it slip to Henrik that I was still an empath, and once he found _that_ out he was like a kid at fucking Christmas, he…”

 

* * *

 

“… and then Jonathan insisted on driving me to the hospital himself, which was reasonable I suppose, and on the way he asked if I’d been seeing anyone about, you know, all of it, and insisted I needed to, so… here I am,” Adele finally finished, about an hour later.

Yvonne blinked a few times; her eyes had roughly doubled in size since Adele had begun her story. She looked down at her many pages of notes and started flipping through them. “Goodness,” she said. “That’s… quite a lot to unpack.” She looked back up at Adele. “Before we dig in, though, would you mind telling me what exactly you’re hoping to get out of all this?”

“Mostly I’d just like to get to the point where I’m not punching people in the face before I’ve made a conscious decision to punch them in the face,” Adele replied dryly. Yvonne smiled.

“I think we can do that,” she said. “Anything else?”

Adele bit her lip. “Well… I don’t know. I suppose I’d like to work on forgiving my husband,” she said softly.

“For not going to Tibet with you?” Yvonne asked.

“What? No, not that, that was-I mean, I should have told him I was-no, I’m not upset with him about that. It’s…” Adele took a deep breath and let it out heavily, “when I was gone-and I knew, I _knew_ he’d struggle if I didn’t make it back, that’s why I asked my brother to-but after I didn’t make it back, he didn’t exactly handle parenting our son well.” Adele paused. “Actually, the more I learn about it, the more I’m convinced it qualifies as outright emotional neglect.”

Yvonne nodded slowly. “I see.”

“And I know he didn’t mean it to be, obviously, and Adrien seems mostly fine-although that’s worrying sometimes, he’s a little too good at seeming fine, if you know what I mean-and most days I think I’ve forgiven him, and I know I’d never leave him, but every now and then it just _hits_ me and I don’t know what to do. I knew he had trouble expressing himself emotionally when I married him, I knew it might be an issue if we had a child, I just always assumed I’d be there to balance him out. But I wasn’t, and he just got worse when I disappeared, instead of…” Adele cut herself off with a frustrated groan. “Anyway. That’s the biggest thing I’d like to work on, I guess.”

“We can certainly do that,” Yvonne said. She paused. “Is there anyone else you’re interested in forgiving?”

Adele’s eyes widened in surprise. “Jonathan? Jesus, I don’t know. A part of me wants to, of course it does, but after everything he’s done-and to so many people, to the entire city, really, and all of it ostensibly for my benefit-isn’t it, I don’t know, kind of a slap in the face to his victims if I forgive him for all that? It just seems like it would be wrong. You actually think I should?”

“I wouldn’t dream of telling you that you should or shouldn’t forgive anybody,” Yvonne said, “although I will say that forgiveness is a very personal thing, and that if you _want_ to forgive your brother, you shouldn’t feel guilty about that. Your forgiveness concerns only the two of you; it cannot absolve him of anything he’s done to anybody else. But no, actually, I wasn’t talking about your brother. I was talking about you.”

“Me?” Adele frowned, confused. “I don’t need to forgive myself for anything.”

Yvonne raised an eyebrow. “Adele, I’ve just sat here for over two hours listening to some of the saddest, most awful things I’ve heard in this room, and I don’t think you once told me about a single terrible thing that happened to you without immediately offering some explanation for how you’d brought it on yourself.”

“I… no, I don’t do that,” Adele said defensively. Yvonne flipped back to the beginning of her notes.

“It was your fault your son’s daycare was attacked back in 2002-you didn’t have any real rational for that, but you seemed very convinced of it-”

“He knew who we were, we must have let something slip at some point-”

“It was your fault for getting captured in Tibet-”

“Well, I shouldn’t have gone alone, if I’d called Gabriel from the airport and told him I was going with or without him he would have followed, I’m sure of it.”

“The geis was your fault, for letting Henrik know you were still an empath,” Adele bit back a defense of that, realizing she was only proving Yvonne’s point for her, “… and of course, you expressed feelings of guilt multiple times for everything your brother’s done.” Yvonne looked up from her notes and waited patiently for Adele’s response. For a long while, Adele was silent.

“Oh,” Adele whispered.

“So… is that something you’d like to work on as well?”

Adele considered the question for a while. “I don’t know,” she finally said. Yvonne nodded gently.

“That’s alright,” she said. “We can come back to it.”

“I just,” Adele grabbed a tissue off the table preemptively, “I don’t know, it just sounds exhausting, that’s all. And I’m not sure how much you’ll actually be able to do. Maybe we should just focus on the whole not-punching people thing. If I wind up punching my son, I _know_ I’ll never forgive myself. It’s bad enough I…” she trailed off.

“Bad enough you what?”

“Bad enough I let him grow up without me,” Adele whispered.

“Sixteen isn’t grown up,” Yvonne pointed out.

“It might as well be,” Adele said bitterly. “He’s grown up so much in four years, done so much, I missed it all, and… and we’re not _connected_ , the way we used to be-I was gone too long, he grew up too much without me, he’s too far away. I know he’s overjoyed to have me back, I know that more than anybody, but there’s this _gulf_ , and I can’t-you don’t believe me!”

Yvonne jumped slightly in her seat. “Pardon?”

“You don’t-I can sense it, you’re _skeptical_ , why would I say any of this if it wasn’t true?” Adele asked, furious.

“I… oh. Goodness.” Yvonne raised her eyebrows. “I can see treating you is going to present some… unique challenges.” She sighed. “Of course I believe that _you_ believe it, Adele, but from where I’m sitting it really isn’t as hopeless as all that, I promise.”

Adele shrugged, slightly mollified. “Well, maybe.”

Yvonne took a while to consider her next words carefully. “Adele… I remember you being a very good student, back when we were at university together.”

“So?”

“Would you mind if I asked you a question that might have shown up on one of our exams back then?”

“I didn't get an advanced degree in Psychology like you did,” Adele said. “I barely even used what I got, I was a lycée guidance counselor for less than five years. And that was ages ago.”

“Still. Humor me.”

Adele sighed. “Alright.”

“So… imagine the question is to diagnose a hypothetical patient based on a list of symptoms.”

Adele rolled her eyes. “Is she a forty-one year old woman from Paris?”

“Try to forget that we’re talking about you for a moment.”

“Fine, fine.”

“She’s endured four years of captivity, filled with both physical and mental abuse. Now she’s free, but she’s having trouble sleeping. Nightmares and flashbacks, both accompanied by violent outbursts. Panic attacks. Intermittent feelings of fear, hopelessness, numbness. She feels detached from her loved ones. What does that sound like to you?”

Adele exhaled slowly. “Oh,” she said. “Well, when you list them all together like that I guess it’s kind of obvious.”

“It’s textbook PTSD, Adele,” Yvonne said. “On some level you must have already realized that.”

Adele bit her lip. “I guess I didn’t want to think of it in that way.”

“That’s understandable,” Yvonne assured her. “You know it’s not something with an easy recovery path, and that’s scary. But there _is_ a recovery path. When you feel detached from your family sometimes, you think of it as though it’s an objective assessment of reality, something external, but it’s _not_. It’s a symptom of what happened to you, and like any other symptom it can be treated.” Yvonne leaned forward and took Adele’s hand. “Adele, I promise we’re going to get you through this, okay?”

After a moment, Adele nodded shakily. “Okay,” she said.


	8. The Next Six Years

2017

  
Adele didn’t talk to her brother again for about two months, and that was only a brief phone call. Still, it felt like progress. It felt less wrong than Adele had expected, anyway. She saw him in person a few months after that, and the conversation was less surface this time. It was starting to get easier to admit she missed him, cared about how he was doing, despite everything.

It wasn’t until their fourth conversation that Adele worked up the nerve to ask Jonathan how, exactly, he’d recovered her Miraculous two years earlier. And she could tell he’d been expecting the question and dreading it, but he told her all of it anyway. It was hard to listen to, but strangely Adele wasn’t quite as angry at the end of his explanation as she would have expected.

Later that day, when Adrien was still at school and Gabriel was tied up in meetings, Adele stole away and looked up a phone number online. It was much easier to find than she'd expected, actually. Adele was still getting used to how much better the Internet had gotten in her absence, even after a year of being back in the world. At any rate, in almost no time at all the phone was ringing, and Adele was holding her breath nervously.

“Assalamualaikum,” a woman’s voice answered.

“Hi. Sorry, I don't speak Bengali,” Adele apologized in English. “Is this Dr. Malangi?”

“Yes?”

“Rokeya Malangi?”

“Can I help you?”

“Um. You don't know who I am, but my name is Adele Agreste and I’m-”

“Oh! Adele! Of course I know who you are, Nooroo told me all-hang on, let me shut the door.” There was a brief rustling sound as Rokeya put her phone down, and then the distant sound of a door being shut firmly. “Nooroo told me all about you,” Rokeya continued. “He asked me to look you up when I first found him. You were still missing then, of course, he was devastated. I can't tell you how happy I was to read about your rescue last year.”

“You heard about that all the way in Bangladesh?” Adele asked, stunned.

“It wasn't on the local news, obviously, but I-” Rokeya paused. “Your brother said he was going back to Paris,” she continued gently, “so I kept an eye on the news there. Until it was all over, anyway.”

“Oh. Of course.” Adele sighed. “That must have been difficult for you.”

“It was,” Rokeya agreed. “And it was hard not to feel guilty, as well.”

Adele almost protested vehemently at this, but she caught herself. “That is a personality flaw we have in common, I think,” she said instead.

“I suspect it is not the only one,” Rokeya replied. “We are suited to the same Miraculous, after all.” She paused. “Speaking of which. I read that the Miraculous was safe now, but how is Nooroo?”

“Nooroo is safe, too,” Adele assured her. “He’s… recovering, though. It will be many years before he's ready to be active again.”

 _You can't have it back_ hung in the air, unspoken.

“I see,” Rokeya said. “Well, many years is not so long to his kind, I suppose. Is that why you called, to explain this?”

“Yes,” Adele said, “and also just to see how you were doing, too. To make sure you were all right.”

Rokeya laughed. “Oh, I'm fine,” she assured Adele.

“Really?”

“Really. It was hard at first, but now…” Rokeya paused, considering exactly how to put her feelings into words. “I'm grateful, I had the opportunity to do so much good, even though it was only for a few months. And I got to learn that about myself, that I am a hero at heart. Most people never get to know.” She paused again. “But since then, I've learned more. I'm still a doctor, I still do good. And I'm still an empath, actually. A much weaker one, but it helps me with my patients quite a lot. So I've learned that there are many ways to be a hero. Most of them don't require a Miraculous.”

  
2018

 

“Dude, I can't believe you forgot to pack the climbing wall,” Nino exclaimed in mock exasperation. Adrien smiled and handed his friend one of the last two boxes.

“I don't think our new place can fit the climbing wall, Nino.”

“Oh, I’d make it fit, trust me,” Nino said, gazing up at the monstrosity in admiration for a moment before carrying the box out. Adrien took one last look around his childhood bedroom. It hadn’t always been the happiest of places to grow up, true, but there were more than a few happy memories here, and moving out was bittersweet. Smiling, Adrien lifted the final box and carried it out of the room, through the mansion, and out to the small rental truck waiting in the front. His mother was talking to Nino when he got there.

“… and I'm counting on you to bring him back here at least once a week for dinner, got it?”

“Can do, Mrs. Agreste,” Nino promised. Adele hugged him before turning to her son.

“You’ll call if you need anything?” she asked.

“Of course,” Adrien assured her.

“We do mean _anything_ ,” his father added, putting an arm around his wife’s shoulders. “We do have quite a lot of resources at our disposal, I do hope you’ll keep them in mind.”

Adrien didn't entirely succeed at suppressing an eye-roll. “Of course, Father,” he said affectionately, before hugging them both tightly and then getting into the truck, waving briefly as Nino drove them off.

Sighing, Adele leaned against her husband and pulled a tissue out of her purse. He looked down at her, slightly apprehensively.

“Are those happy tears?” he asked. He wasn't particularly comfortable with either sort, obviously, but happy ones were slightly easier to navigate. Adele nodded.

“Mostly,” she said. “He’s happy, its going to be good for him. We… we did good, right? In the end?”

Gabriel kissed the top of her head. “What end?” he asked.

  
2020

  
Adele glanced at her vibrating cell phone and frowned. Usually her brother let her initiate contact, and they'd spoken less than two weeks ago. She focused on her empathy quickly, making sure no one was within hearing distance, before answering.

“Jonathan?”

“Can we meet?” he asked immediately. “In person, that is?”

“Is something wrong?”

“Do you watch the news?”

It took Adele a moment to grasp his meaning. “Are you calling about the coven?”

“Yeah. Look, I know normally my assistance isn't needed… or desired… or appreciated, but they've gone up against those guys three times now and they're not exactly making progress.”

“I'm sure they can handle it,” Adele said defensively.

“Well,” Jonathan replied, “if your son and his girlfriend would like to handle it _without_ getting wasted by spells every other minute, I've got a couple of amulets you can give them that should block the coven’s particular brand of magic.”

Adele considered this. “I'm not sure they'll be inclined to trust any amulets enough to wear them, given the source.”

“Oh, just say they're from you, then,” Jonathan snapped impatiently. “Make something up about having them from fighting rogue witches with Gabriel in the nineties. Do you want to keep Adrien safe from these guys or not?”

“Fine, fine,” Adele said. “I'll be at your place in an hour. Happy?”

“Ecstatic.”

  
2022

  
Alya Césaire took a moment to steady herself before ringing the bell outside the door of one of the nicest apartments she’d ever seen. It was a while before she heard footsteps on the other side, and she briefly wondered how long it took just to walk from one end of the place to the other.

Chloé Bourgeois answered the door with a scowl, but her face shifted into an artificial smile when she recognized Alya. “Alya! Oh my God, it’s been forever! Wow! What are you doing here? In my building? With a doorman that gets paid quite a lot of money to keep people in the lobby until they’ve been announced?”

“Oh, the day they make a doorman I can’t talk my way past is the day hell freezes over,” Alya said cheerfully. “Can we chat?”

“Sorry,” Chloé said insincerely, “I’m getting picked up for a charity auction in twenty minutes, and as you can see I’m still a complete mess.” Chloé was wearing a stunning, immaculate evening gown, her makeup was perfect, and she had three hair curlers left to remove, with the rest of her hair cascading down her shoulders in soft waves. Chloé turned to go, starting to close the door in Alya’s face, but Alya pushed past her and into the apartment.

“This’ll only take a minute, I promise. We can talk while you finish getting ready,” Alya said. Chloé rolled her eyes but didn’t protest, so Alya followed her through the apartment, to a huge bathroom with a giant mirror surrounded by lights. Chloé sat down at it and carefully began to remove one of the remaining curlers.

“Well?” she asked impatiently, looking at Alya in the mirror.

“Okay, I just need to set up some time to interview you for my book. I’ve been calling you for weeks now but for some reason I haven’t been able to get ahold of you.”

“Oh. Hmm. Gosh, I don’t know, Alya, I’m really busy lately.” Chloé started to brush out the curl.

“It’ll only take an hour. I will do this interview at literally any hour you have free, okay? I don’t care if it’s the middle of the night, I just _really_ need this. Please?”

“Sorry, I just don’t see it happening. I don’t expect you to understand what it’s like, always going to these charity events, trying to make the world a better place. It’s its own reward, of course, but it doesn’t really leave me any time for other people’s hobbies.”

Alya bit the inside of her cheek and tried to stay calm. “This isn’t a hobby, Chloé, it’s my job, and this book might just be the most important thing I do in my entire career. You get that this book is going to make the world a better place, right? You know what it’s about?”

“Yes,” Chloé said, a little testily, as she pulled out the second curler, “I’ve heard all about it, and frankly, I don’t see the point.”

It took real effort for Alya to keep her jaw from dropping. “Seriously? You don’t see the point of telling our side of things? Of making everyone understand that it wasn’t our fault, that we’re not different or worse than anybody else?”

“It was a million years ago, Alya, nobody cares about it anymore. Everybody else moved on, I don’t know why you can’t.”

“You’re telling me you don’t notice the looks you get, when people find out you were akumatized back then?”

“I don’t get _looks_ ,” Chloé said defensively, “and if you do, I would worry less about having been akumatized and more about matching my concealer to my skin tone a little more closely.”

Alya gritted her teeth for a moment before pulling a spreadsheet out of her purse. “Chloé. Look. This is a list of everyone, every akuma victim, all one hundred and eighty-nine of them. And I have managed to get ahold of one hundred and sixty-three so far. And of those hundred and sixty-three, you are the _only_ one who didn’t _immediately_ jump at the chance to tell her side of things. I have to have everyone, don’t you see that?”

Chloé started taking out her last curler. “Alya. Read my lips. I don’t. Want to be. In your stupid. Book.”

Alya finally snapped. “Well, I hate to be the one to tell you this, Chloé, but you’re actually already in here kind of a lot,” she said sardonically. “So you might as well-”

“Ha!” Chloé exclaimed triumphantly, slamming her hairbrush down and glaring at Alya in the mirror. “I knew it! I knew, I _knew_ that’s what your stupid book was about!”

Alya frowned, confused. “What are you talking about?”

“Oh, don’t blame the poor akumas, right?” Chloé asked, her tone mocking. “They couldn’t help it, they were the _victims_ , the _real_ villain was that nasty Chloé Bourgeois, she’s the one who made them angry, made them sad, she’s the one that turned them into villains. Right?”

For a moment, Alya was speechless. “Chloé, no, I-”

“I’m not the same person I was when I was fifteen, Alya, are you? I don’t appreciate you dragging up the past, waving it around, trying to get everyone to see me like that again. I have worked very hard to move past all of it, to become something better, and you’re trying to _ruin_ it.”

“Chloé,” Alya said slowly, kicking herself mentally for not realizing why her classmate had been so difficult, “Chloé, listen to me. I… know we don’t like each other,” Chloé scoffed, “but look, I do not for a second blame you for my akumatization, do you understand me? And nobody I’ve interviewed so far blames you for theirs, either. Do you blame Ladybug for yours?”

“Well… no,” Chloé admitted.

“Exactly! Okay, sure, maybe you could have been nicer back then. I mean… like, a _lot_ nicer.” Chloé rolled her eyes. “But Ladybug could have been nicer to you, too, and Kim could have been nicer to Ivan, but nobody treats everybody perfectly _all the time_ , do they? People need to be able to make mistakes, and… and people need to be able to feel _bad_ about things, too! Those are just normal parts of life, aren’t they? We didn’t deserve what happened to us, and you didn’t deserve to get attacked by supervillains all the time. There is only _one_ person that’s responsible for everything that happened that year, and it sure as hell isn’t you. _That’s_ what this book is about, Chloé, I promise. You and me, we understand that already, but once I publish this book everyone in Paris is going to understand it, too. Okay?”

For a moment, Chloé didn’t speak, but then she abruptly reached forward and grabbed a tissue from a box on her vanity desk. She dabbed at the corners of her eyes impatiently. “You’re lucky I’m wearing waterproof mascara, Césaire,” she muttered. She groaned loudly in defeat. “ _Fine_ , I’ll do it, I’ll be in your little book. I guess I can clear an hour sometime next week. Happy?” Grinning, Alya hugged Chloé impulsively. “Watch it, you’re wrinkling my dress!” Chloé snapped, but she briefly hugged Alya back before kicking her out of the apartment.

  
2023

  
Marinette woke up first, as the sunlight filtered in gently through the window to their apartment’s bedroom. Slowly her memory of the night before came back to her, and she smiled happily. Rolling onto her side, she gazed adoringly at the man next to her for a moment before reaching up and running her fingers through his messy blonde hair. Marinette could’ve sworn he purred a little at this before opening his eyes halfway and returning her smile.

“Hey, you,” Adrien said softly, inching closer to her and nuzzling her neck.

“Hey, you,” Marinette replied. She sighed happily. “Was last night even real?”

“Mm hmm,” Adrien murmured into her neck. “No take-backs.” Marinette laughed.

“What do we do first?” she asked. “Tell your parents? Tell my parents? Or do we just skip straight to picking out a ring?”

“All those things sound suspiciously like they involve leaving this bed,” Adrien said, and now he was tracing his index finger over her arms, her shoulders. “I don’t ever want to move from here.”

“If we never leave this bed, we’ll never get married,” Marinette pointed out, “and that would render your very beautiful proposal somewhat empty.”

“That is a real dilemma,” Adrien said seriously. “I’ll have to think about it, right here, for at least the next five hours.” On the nightstand, Adrien’s phone began to buzz insistently. Sighing, he rolled over and grabbed it. “It’s my mom,” he told Marinette, before putting it on speaker. “Hi, Mom-”

“Hi, Mrs. Agreste,” Marinette added quickly.

“Everything okay?” Adrien asked.

“Oh, everything’s great,” Adele replied casually. “I was just wondering why I’m finding out about my only child’s engagement from the newspaper, that’s all.”

Adrien and Marinette exchanged a sudden, horrified look. “ _What_?” Adrien said.

“You haven’t seen it yet? It’s everywhere. It’s not some kind of hoax, is it? You two _did_ get engaged last night?”

“No, we did-and obviously we were going to tell you right away, I swear, I just-”

“God _damn_ it, Alya!” Marinette exclaimed, having immediately looked up the news story on her own phone. She tilted the screen towards her fiance. The main page of the Ladyblog was boasting exclusive-albeit highly grainy-footage of Chat Noir on bended knee at the top of the Eiffel Tower late the night before, of Ladybug nodding excitedly, of the two of them kissing. “I love her but I hate her, she’s my best friend in the world but sometimes I just wanna-oh, great, now she’s texting me personally about it.” Growling slightly, Marinette angrily started texting her friend back, stabbing the screen forcefully with her fingertips on every keystroke. “Oh. Em. Gee. So. Awesome. Exclamation point. Exclamation point. Exclamation point. Smiley face. _Send_.”

“Mom, can I call you back?” Adrien asked, as he gently pried his fiancee’s phone out of her hands before she broke it.

“Of course, sweetheart. Do stop by soon, though, your father and I are very excited to celebrate. Congratulations!”

“Thanks.” Adrien hung up, let the hand holding his phone drop, and looked at Marinette. “Now what?”

“Well, obviously we can’t be engaged anymore.”

“ _What_?”

“I mean in public, kitty!” Marinette said hurriedly. “Of course we’re still engaged, but now we can’t tell anyone for a while, can we? If I tell Alya that you and I got engaged last night she’s just bound to finally put two and two together.”

“Jeez, don’t scare me like that,” Adrien said, sighing in relief. Marinette leaned over him and kissed his nose.

“Sorry, sorry.” She sighed. “We’d better get engaged in front of other people in a few weeks, as civilians, just to be safe.” She grinned. “I’m not sure how you’ll top your first proposal, but I’m looking forward to finding out.”

“Excuse me?” Adrien asked. “Don’t you mean you’re not sure how _you’ll_ top my proposal?”

“Huh?”

“Well, it’s only fair. I did the first one, it’s your turn now. It’s okay, though, you don’t have to top mine, I know it was perfect.”

“Is that a _challenge_ , Agreste?” Marinette asked, her eyes lighting up the way they did whenever she got competitive. “Just you wait and see, my proposal’s gonna blow yours out of the water.”

“I can’t wait,” Adrien told her, beaming.

“You know,” Marinette said, “now that we’re not engaged anymore, all my plans for the day are shot. What _are_ we going to do with all this free time we suddenly have?”

Adrien wrapped an arm around her waist and pulled her to his side, so that his lips were only a few centimeters away from her ear. “Oh, I’ve got a few ideas,” he whispered.


	9. An Unexpected Reunion

There had been a time in Jonathan Dumas’ life, long ago, when getting kidnapped or taken hostage was something of an occupational hazard. It had just been one of the many, many risks that came with being close to Paris’ own superhero duo, after all. It had been dangerous, sure, but despite that it had probably been the best time of his life.

So when Jonathan found himself being captured, beaten, handcuffed and forcibly locked in a small dark room-well, it was painful, humiliating and infuriating, sure, but it was hard to not feel a little nostalgic as well.

Jonathan managed to catch himself just enough on the way down that his head didn't slam _too_ forcefully into the hard floor of the room, but he still felt a little dizzy. He lay there unmoving for a few moments, trying to regroup.

“¿Está herido?" a familiar voice asked.

Of course. Of _course_ they’d lock him the same room as-

“Soy Ferdinand,” the voice continued, when Jonathan didn't respond.

“Yeah, I know,” Jonathan said. He sat up slowly, trying not to groan too much as he did so, and waved as best he could with his hands linked together. “Hi, Ferd.”

Like Jonathan, Ferd was also sitting on the floor, handcuffed. He squinted in the dim light from the far corner of the empty room, and then his jaw dropped. “ _Jonathan_?” He blinked rapidly. “Am I hallucinating?”

“Nope,” Jonathan said, resigned. “It's really me.”

“What the… what are you _doing_ here?”

“… Like in Madrid, or-”

“ _Here_ , Jonathan, like here in this _room_ ,” Ferd said impatiently.

“Um. Well. Your sister called me yesterday and said you'd been kidnapped by some organized crime family five days ago-”

“Which sister?” Ferd interrupted, sounding more annoyed than anything else. “Was it Carmen? I bet it was Carmen, it figures she'd still have your number after all this time.”

“It was Carmen, yes,” Jonathan said, “but you know, all four of them are pretty worried. And Fatima’s beside herself, obviously.”

Ferd sighed at his mother's name. “I'm sure she is. Jesus, is she having a bad month.”

“Yeah, Carmen told me about your dad. I'm so sorry.”

“Thanks. He, uh, he'd been sick for a while, actually. I’ve been back here for the last six months, I took a sabbatical so I could be close enough to help with everything. The last month was pretty rough. You don't ever want to say these things are a blessing, because of course they're not, but-”

“No, I understand. I've been there, actually. With my mom.” Ferd nodded.

“Why did Carmen call _you_?” he asked, after a pause. “I mean, no offense, but she only met you once, and it was, what, eight years ago?”

“I think she called literally every single human being she could think of, honestly,” Jonathan told him. “Anyone that might be able to help, anyway. I was pretty far down the list, I think. But she remembered me helping with the hex, and she thought I might know of some magic that could bust you out of here.”

“Do you?” Ferd asked, and there was a spark of hope that Jonathan wished he couldn’t feel.

“Uh. Well, I _thought_ I did. But I seem to have underestimated the defenses in this place.”

“Oh. So you getting locked in here with me isn’t part of some ingenious escape plan?”

“Sorry,” Jonathan said. “The escape plan is now officially, completely off the rails.”

“Oh, well,” Ferd sighed. “I appreciate the effort, I guess.”

“Don't worry,” Jonathan said, “I'm pretty good at improvising. I'll figure something out.” They sat in silence for a few minutes, and then Ferd noticed an odd scraping noise.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Taking these stupid cuffs off,” Jonathan replied. “I’m a little out of practice, but I’ve almost got… there we go.” There was a sudden clattering as the handcuffs fell off his wrists to the floor. Jonathan looked over at Ferd. “Want me to get yours?”

Ferd shrugged. “Sure, why not.” Jonathan stood up and closed the few meters of distance between them before crouching down over Ferd’s wrists. Ferd watched him work for a minute. “So you’ve, uh, broken out of handcuffs a lot, then?”

“Oh, once upon a time,” Jonathan said, attacking the lock with the paperclip he’d had the foresight to bring with him. “God, I miss the nineties.” Ferd snorted, and for the first time since recognizing Jonathan, Ferd seemed at least somewhat happy that he was there.

“So, um,” Jonathan was having more trouble picking this lock, because a lot of his energy and focus was suddenly going towards pointedly not thinking about how close Ferd’s face was to his own, “your sisters, they didn’t actually know what you’d done to piss the Morenos off.”

“I didn’t _do_ anything,” Ferd said defensively. “I politely turned down a job offer.”

“Really?” The handcuffs finally opened, and Ferd pulled them off as Jonathan sat down on the floor next to him, leaning heavily against the wall.

“Well. I guess I wasn't so polite a week ago. But it was right after the funeral, and anyway I was plenty polite for their first three months of asking.” Ferd rubbed his wrists. “I told you about my grandfather once, do you remember?”

“The one you inherited the runic affinity from? Sure.”

“Well, I found out why he didn't want me or my sisters getting into any magic stuff. See, he had an older brother. I never met him, because they were estranged since before I was born. Since before my dad was born, actually. None of us knew why, but it turns out it’s because his brother worked for the Morenos. My grandfather thought it was despicable, he completely disapproved until the day his brother died. Which was decades ago, but recently the Moreno family had a change in leadership. The last guy, the one my uncle worked for, he retired and left his sons in charge. And they've got big plans, apparently, some nonsense about restoring the family to its former glory. They're branching out into the supernatural, and they decided the Benavente family owed them a new magician. But my uncle never had kids, so that leaves me or my sisters. I’m not sure if the Morenos are too decent to abduct women or too sexist to want to hire them-I guess I don’t care either way, as long as they leave them alone. But for whatever reason, they’ve decided it has to be me.”

“And when you declined?”

“Apparently they've also decided that taking ‘no’ for an answer is beneath them. From me, anyway.”

“I see.” Jonathan stood slowly, pushing against the wall for support. “I assume you've already gone over this entire room looking for weak points, but I think I'll double-check all the same.”

“Be my guest.”

It was a fairly small room, and completely unfurnished. It took less than a minute for Jonathan to circle it slowly.

“Find any secret escape tunnels I missed?” Ferd asked.

“Nope, no luck.” Jonathan leaned against the room’s heavy door, bolted from the outside. “I’ll just park here and listen for anybody coming.”

“I don’t think you’ll be able to hear anyone through that door, it’s pretty thick.”

Jonathan shrugged. “Worth a shot,” he said, not mentioning that he was relying more on his empathy, which was unaffected by physical barriers. “Maybe I can catch them off guard when they show up, if there’s only two or three of them.”

“That’s very noble of you,” Ferd said, “but it’ll be a while probably. Well, unless they want to take care of you earlier, I guess, I don’t know, but if they stick to the same schedule as always they’re not going to show up for another few hours. At which point they’ll drag me in front of the damn Moreno brothers and repeat their stupid job offer.”

“Oh.” Still leaning against the door, Jonathan slid down until he was sitting on the floor again. “What are they like? The Moreno brothers?”

Ferd shrugged. “Javier’s the older one, but he’s been pretty passive. Hector seems to be the one who calls all the shots. He’s very… insistent. Not as intimidating as he thinks he is, either. I’m not sure what exactly he’s overcompensating for, but it’s definitely something.”

“Got it.” Jonathan wracked his brain, trying to think of anything that might be helpful, anything that might get them out, but he had very little to work with. He’d had some experience in this department, true, but obviously “stall until my superhero sister and her boyfriend show up” was no longer a viable plan.

Breaking out of the room was out. Waiting for someone to open the door and forcing their way past might work, if there weren’t too many guys on the other side. Talking their way out of it might have worked, if Jonathan spoke Spanish, but-

“Okay,” Ferd said, breaking the silence after about ten minutes, “I get that I'm about to make the next couple of hours very awkward but I have to ask. The last time we saw each other. When you promised you'd call when you were ready to start dating again.”

Jonathan braced himself. “Yeah?”

“Did you know at the time you wouldn't ever be calling me?”

“Yes.”

Ferd nodded. Jonathan didn't sense any real disappointment from Ferd, or even surprise. A touch of embarrassment, but just barely. Mostly he just seemed to appreciate the honesty. “I'm not sure how I misread that so badly,” Ferd said, without a trace of bitterness. “Usually I have pretty good instincts.” He looked over at Jonathan. “I hope you didn't come all this way to help me because you felt guilty,” he said. “It's been eight years, I'm very much over it.”

“I didn’t come here because I felt guilty about not calling, no. I…” Why _had_ Jonathan come? When he'd known that even if the rescue was flawless, this thing could only ever end the exact same way it had ended the first time? “I just wanted to help, that's all. And you didn't misread anything. I meant everything I said back then, I swear, I just… it's complicated. And I knew back then it would never be less complicated. I should have said so eight years ago. I'm sorry.”

“You know,” Ferd said, and his tone hadn't changed but now Jonathan could feel annoyance creeping into his mind, “I've heard ‘It's complicated’ before. More times than I can remember. It never really is, though.”

“Well, this time it is. Trust me.”

Ferd scoffed. “Sure.” Jonathan said nothing, hoping that would be the end of it, but it wasn't. “I mean,” Ferd continued, “I was willing to give you the benefit of the doubt for a while. I don’t know what your deal is, exactly, but obviously you’ve got _some_ crazy stuff going on. I thought maybe you were involved in some weird spy thing with your sister, maybe some magic curse of your own to deal with, I must have come up with a hundred theories.”

“Ferd-”

“But at the end of the day, ‘it’s complicated’ is just a way of saying ‘I don’t want to be with you’ without actually having the guts to say it. And I don’t know why, because I don’t actually know you very well at all, but for some reason I thought you were better than that.”

If Jonathan had been in even a slightly better place, he never would have said it. But he was still sore from getting caught and beaten, he was humiliated, this rescue wasn't going at _all_ how he'd imagined, and getting abducted had always brought out the impulsive side of Jonathan. And he'd always hated keeping secrets.

“… because you not wanting me is, that’s your right, but you thinking I can't handle basic rejection, _that’s_ what bothers me, I'm not a teenager anymore, I'm a fifty-three year old man, I actually am capable of conducting myself like an adult instead of-”

“I'm Hawkmoth.”

Ferd stopped mid-rant and blinked. “Pardon?”

“The villain. The one that akumatized you ten years ago. That was me. And I couldn't tell you, and dating you without telling you seemed cruel, so I figured not calling was the best I could do by you. That’s what ‘it’s complicated’ meant.”

For a minute, Ferd was speechless. “Well, points for creativity,” he finally said. “That is definitely not an explanation I'd considered.”

“You think I'm making it up.”

“I know you're making it up. Why would you even say something like that?” Jonathan didn't respond. He honestly hadn’t expected to be doubted, and the thought of arguing the point was too much. “His voice was in my _head_ , Jonathan. I don't remember anything else, but I remember that. I'm pretty sure I would have noticed if you had the same voice.”

“Oh,” Jonathan said, suddenly understanding. “Well no, actually, you wouldn't have.” He leaned the back of his head against the door. “The Miraculouses have very powerful identity protection built in. It's basically impossible to identify a holder in real life based on similarities of appearance, voice, anything like that.” He sighed. “Of course, now that I've told you, it stops working, so if you try remembering that voice _now_ you'll be perfectly capable of noticing. Unless you've forgotten what it sounded like, but I'm guessing that even after ten years it's not the kind of thing you-” Jonathan stopped talking, abruptly cut off by the wave of horror he was suddenly sensing.

Idly, Jonathan wondered why he didn’t regret what he’d just done. Obviously telling Ferd at all had been stupid, reckless, but telling him here, now, while they were both trapped together, was possibly the worst version of telling him imaginable. And true, a part of Jonathan had been tempted to tell Ferd eight years ago, seduced by the possibility that Ferd somehow wouldn’t mind, somehow might accept it. But based on the emotional signature Jonathan was picking up from Ferd now, that definitely was not how this was playing out. Shock, disbelief, revulsion-all the emotions that Jonathan had dreaded, they were all there. His fear that Ferd would find out and hate him had come to pass, and all Jonathan felt was resignation.

Well, it was Ferd’s right to hate Jonathan after all. Maybe it had been wrong eight years ago, to ever let Ferd feel anything different for Jonathan to begin with. Maybe some wrong had been righted.

 

* * *

 

“Why me?” Ferd asked, after a long period of silence. A quick flash of embarrassment followed. “Jesus, that sounded way more self-pitying than I meant it to. I’m just genuinely curious, how did you pick me that day? I know you had like two hundred victims or whatever, but two hundred people out of an entire city is actually still pretty goddamn selective. Was I really the angriest person in Paris at that moment? Because I'm, like, a pretty laid-back guy. And you know, you actually had me doubting that about myself for a really long time afterwards. For ages I wondered if maybe I was secretly repressing all this rage or something, something that would explain-but no, I’m definitely not. If you hadn't come along I think I would have been over it in fifteen minutes. So out of millions of people, how'd I get picked?”

Jonathan sighed. “I wish I could remember.” Ferd said nothing to this, but Jonathan could feel what a punch in the gut it had been. “I tried, I really did,” Jonathan continued, somewhat desperately. “After we met, I looked it up. But you were one of the earlier ones, and after a certain point they all just started blending together-”

“Stop talking,” Ferd whispered, closing his eyes.

 

* * *

 

“So I assume you've got some tragic backstory that justifies everything,” Ferd said, breaking the silence after almost an hour. For a moment, Jonathan wasn’t sure if he’d imagined it or not.

“Not really,” Jonathan said.

“Orphan? Murdered lover? I guess I can rule out ‘horrifying lab accident’.”

“Nothing like-well, actually, I am an orphan. And I guess that's somewhat relevant, but it doesn't justify anything.” Jonathan tapped his fingers nervously against his leg. “You want the long version or the short version?” he asked.

“Oh, let's start with the shortest version you have,” Ferd said, with a heavily affected casualness. “I'm not sure how much longer we have before the muscle shows up to drag us in front of the Moreno brothers for their daily job offer.”

“Okay. Shortest version possible, I guess, is that my sister went missing-which you already knew-and I went looking for her. I found her Miraculous three years later. I knew it wasn't powerful enough to bring her back-especially if she was dead, which at that point seemed very likely. But I knew there were Miraculouses back in Paris that _were_ powerful enough, and that they'd be activated if things got bad enough. So I came back and I… I made things bad enough.”

Ferd took a minute to absorb this. “ _Her_ Miraculous,” he repeated. Genuine curiosity now seemed to be somewhat tempering his hurt and anger, at least. “So… your sister was Butterfly. Is that why she got grabbed by that cult?”

“Yeah. She single-handedly stopped them from tearing reality apart. But she-you know how the Miraculouses have timers? She popped hers and she didn't have enough time to get out before getting caught. And then she had to toss the thing into the Brahmaputra to keep it out of their hands. God, I hate that fucking river. Three thousand kilometers of water emptying into the largest delta in the world-”

“Jonathan, I cannot imagine caring less right now what your opinion of some river is.”

“Right. Sorry.”

Ferd sighed. “So all of it, that whole year, it was to save your sister?”

“Yeah.”

“Did it? Did it help?”

“Not even a little.”

“Oh. Well, that's a relief,” Ferd said sarcastically. “For a second I was worried the worst day of my life might actually have been good for something.”

 

* * *

 

“Someone’s coming,” Jonathan said, standing up and continuing to lean against the door. Ferd straightened.

“I don’t hear anything,” he said.

“Neither do I,” Jonathan told him. “I can, um, sense people’s emotions, so I can tell when people are nearby.”

“You can sense emotions,” Ferd repeated.

“Yeah.”

“Including mine?”

“Um. Yeah. Sorry. I’d shut it off if I could.”

Ferd rolled his eyes. “Whatever. Can you tell how many there are?”

“Uh… Jesus, there’s like six of them. I don’t think the element of surprise is going to be enough for us to take out six mob thugs.”

“Probably not,” Ferd agreed. Jonathan got the distinct impression that Ferd wouldn’t have minded watching Jonathan try anyway.

Neither of them put up a fight, and the guards didn’t even seem to notice their missing handcuffs. They were led, rather forcefully, out of the room, through a series of hallways, and into an ornately decorated office. Behind a giant wooden desk sat two men. The older one simply watched, but the younger one smirked up at Ferd, and leaned back in his chair smugly.

“Goodness,” Hector Moreno said, looking at Jonathan, who straightened defensively under his gaze, “is this the best your family could come up with? They must not want you back very badly.”

“Oh, that’s alright,” Ferd replied. “If I’ve learned anything this past week, it’s that being in demand is highly overrated.”

“Ferdinand,” Hector said, his tone condescending, “I think we've been more than patient waiting for you to finish considering our generous offer.”

“I finished considering it three months ago, Hector,” Ferd said levelly. “My answer, as always, is no.”

“This is starting to get to inconvenient for all of us, don't you think? It was merely a small annoyance when your family wouldn't stop pestering our friends at the police station-those sorts of misunderstandings can be so easily righted, after all. But now they're sending in,” Hector paused and looked Jonathan up and down again, “whatever _he’s_ supposed to be. Why not just clear everything up before this escalates and somebody gets hurt? Sign the contract, explain to everyone that you work for us now and there are no hard feelings, and we can all get back to our regular lives.”

“Hector, I have six weeks to finalize a syllabus for an advanced course on the reign of Louis X. I do not have _time_ for this. Incidentally, it wouldn't kill you to learn a bit about the man yourself, he had some interesting things to say on the subject of forcing men to do jobs they have no interest in doing. What do they call that, again? Right, slavery. He was against it. Something of a controversial stance in 1315, but nowadays it's a bit more-”

“How dare you,” Hector interrupted, his face turning red. “You should be thanking me for this opportunity. If your great-uncle hadn't served this family well for so many decades, I wouldn't even _begin_ to entertain the notion of making such a generous offer to some half-breed maricón nobody like you. One more slight like that and I won't hesitate to-”

“What's he saying?” Jonathan interrupted in French.

“I'm not translating it,” Ferd replied angrily.

“Why not?”

“One, I don't care to repeat some of the more colorful insults. And two, it is a very run-of-the-mill villain monologue. I assume you've delivered enough of those yourself that you can figure out the gist on your own.”

“Oh.” Jonathan didn't bother denying this.

“Am I interrupting something?” Hector asked sarcastically, glaring at the two of them.

“ _Yes_ , actually,” Ferd snapped. “My life, which I’d like to get back to. Maybe you've got one of your own you’d like to get back to as well? You must have better things to do than listen to me tell you to go to hell once a day, it seems like a waste of resources at the very least.”

“You-”

Suddenly, without any warning whatsoever, Jonathan lunged forward. Before any of the guards could stop him, he’d grabbed a small glass paperweight off the desk and thrown it as hard as he could against the nearest wall, smashing it to bits. Hector stared in disbelief, mouth agape. Javier and the six guards all immediately swayed, as though suddenly dizzy.

“Jonathan,” Ferd said slowly, “what the hell did you just do?”

“I broke the loyalty spell that the talkative one had everybody under,” Jonathan said, sounding pleased with himself. “Which, I mean, jeez, talk about tacky. How hard is it to just give your minions decent benefits?” Jonathan glanced around at the quickly-recovering men surrounding them. “Maybe you’d like to, I don’t know, translate that before we get shot?” he suggested. “It’s only disorienting for like half a minute.”

“Right. Um.” Ferd looked at Javier, who had put a hand to his temple and looked more confused than anything. “He says your brother had you and your men under a loyalty spell, which he’s just broken.”

“Ridiculous,” Hector said, as his brother turned to him. “These men are officially more trouble than they’re worth, I’ve decided.” He snapped at the guard standing behind him. “Get rid of them.” The guard glanced at Javier, who raised an eyebrow and nodded slightly. Nodding back, the guard slammed his gun into the side of Hector’s head, knocking him out instantly. Javier shook his head at Hector’s unconscious form for a moment.

“My own brother,” he muttered. “Disgraceful.” He looked back at Ferd and Jonathan. “It goes without saying, but you’ve done the Moreno family a great service just now. I can’t begin to-”

“So we can go now?” Ferd interrupted.

 

* * *

 

“Hola, mamá. Sí, estoy bién. Por favor no llores mamá…”

Jonathan waited patiently, his hands shoved deep in his pockets, while Ferd called his mother and assured her repeatedly that he was safe, that everything was fine. After about five minutes, Ferd hung up.

“Well, Carmen’s still in Madrid, apparently,” he said. “I guess she’s been staying here ever since I got grabbed, trying to figure out what to do. Anyway, she’ll be here to pick me up in fifteen minutes, so you should probably go. I’ll just… I don’t know, tell her you were eager to get back to Paris and I couldn’t convince you to wait.”

Jonathan nodded slowly. “Right, of course.”

“Not that I don’t appreciate what you did back there,” Ferd said flatly, “but if you’re here when she arrives she’s going to insist on bringing you back home with us, and if that happens it’ll be a solid forty-eight hours of everyone in my family singing your praises. My mother will be hugging you and feeding you and insinuating things and the whole time all I’m going to be able to think about is how she cried for a month and begged me to quit my job and move out of Paris after you-” Ferd cut himself off, unable to finish the sentence. “Anyway. I’ve had a really rough week and I’m just not up for sitting through that.”

Jonathan nodded again and started to walk away. He made it about five steps before turning back. “Your sister has my number, if you’re ever in trouble again or you need-” Ferd cut him off with a weary groan.

“Jesus, Jonathan, you kind of maybe just saved my life back there, can we just call it even and be done with it? You are absolved, okay? You don’t have to show up the next time I get kidnapped by the mafia or whatever.”

Jonathan sighed. “Ferd, if you never want to see me again-I mean, that makes total sense, why would you? I’ll respect that, you’ll never see me again. But I think we both know we’re not _even_. It doesn’t work like that, there’s not some formula for how much you help someone before it becomes magically okay that you once violated their free will. We’ll never be even. So if you are ever in trouble again, or if you ever need something, _anything_ , if you ever want my help again for any reason, just call and it’s yours.”

“Fine,” Ferd said. “But right now I just want you to leave.”

Jonathan looked like he wanted to say something, anything, but he simply nodded and left without another word.

 

* * *

 

Two months later, Jonathan’s phone was sitting on his table when it started ringing. After Jonathan glanced at the name it took another ring before it fully registered, at which point Jonathan practically dove for it, and nearly dropped it in his hurry to answer.

“What’s wrong?” he asked immediately.

“Yikes, hello to you, too,” Ferd replied, sounding amused. “Do you answer the phone like that for everybody, or am I special?”

“Huh? Of course you’re-I mean, no, I just-after the last time we spoke, I figured if you were calling there must be some-”

“Right, the last time we spoke. You know, this might come as a shock, but between my dad dying, getting kidnapped for a week, and you dropping that whole Hawkmoth bombshell out of nowhere, I was not actually at my best the last time we spoke.” Ferd sighed. “But you’re right. You said to call if there was anything I needed?”

“Anything,” Jonathan said. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m _starving_.”

Jonathan blinked. “What?”

“And there’s this new Thai place I’ve been meaning to check out. Well, it’s not actually new, it opened five months ago, but I was in Madrid then and I haven’t had a chance to check it out since getting back.” Ferd waited patiently for Jonathan to recover from his shock for a good minute. “Are you going to say anything?” he finally asked.

“Are you…” Jonathan couldn’t believe he was asking this, “are you asking me out?”

“God, no,” Ferd said cheerfully. “Don’t be ridiculous. That would imply I was paying. Which would be absurd, right? I mean, I’m not the one who owes _you_ an unpayable life-debt.”

Jonathan blinked, still trying and failing to wrap his head around what was happening. “I don’t think those were my exact words,” he finally said.

“You said, and I quote, ‘We’ll never be even’. I find I’m very interested in testing the limits of that claim. At least where dinner’s concerned, anyway, it looks like kind of a pricey restaurant.”

“So…” Jonathan sat down, slowly processing everything. “So you’re… you’re actually okay with it?”

Ferd sighed. “Honestly? I don’t know, I really don’t. I’ve spent the last eight weeks trying to figure it all out in my head. But all I’ve figured out is… I like you. A lot. I really enjoyed spending time with you, I think we had something eight years ago, and I think it’s still there. Some kind of connection that I don’t think I’ve ever felt with anybody else before. And I don’t think that’s just on my end, either, is it?”

“No,” Jonathan said softly, “it’s not.”

“But I don’t know if that’s enough,” Ferd continued. “It’s entirely possible that twenty minutes into the first date, I’ll realize I’m never going to be over what you did to me ten years ago, and that’ll be it. I can’t promise that won’t happen. But maybe it won’t. And I finally realized I’m never going to figure it out if I’m just thinking about it by myself. There’s only one way to find out if this can work or not. And God, I’d really like to find out. Wouldn’t you?”


	10. The Next Generation

Gabriel Agreste was just about to open the giant heavy door of his home when his wife stopped him.

“Wait,” she said. “They feel… I don't know exactly, nervous, anxious.”

Gabriel raised an eyebrow. “So I shouldn't let them in?”

“Of course you should let them in, Gabriel, I'm just giving you a heads-up. Maybe be a little more delicate, until they tell us what's wrong. Less…”

“Myself?” Gabriel asked wryly. Adele rolled her eyes but didn't contradict him. He opened the door, and Adele warmly ushered her son and his wife inside.

“Come in, come in! How are you both? Is everything… alright?”

Marinette looked up at her husband impatiently. “Well? Ask them.”

“Um.” Adrien scratched the back of his neck nervously. “Before I was born… like, exactly nine months before I was born, that is… did Nooroo or Rajji, did they ever say or suggest anything to indicate-”

His mother cut him off with a delighted gasp. “You’re pregnant? Oh!” She threw her arms around Marinette and squeezed her tightly.

“So they _can_ tell? Because we weren't sure if Plagg was just being Plagg, and Tikki refused to confirm or deny it, she said it wasn't their place to-”

“You two seem awfully conflicted about this,” Adele interrupted. “Are you worried about transforming while pregnant? Because that’ll be fine, trust me, I never had any issues. I thought you wanted a baby? Adrien said you were going to start trying months ago.”

“Ha!” Marinette said sarcastically. “ _A_ baby. Adele, I would just love to be pregnant with _a_ baby right now.” She groaned. “I need to sit down,” she announced, before heading off to the nearest living room. Adrien’s parents both looked at him, surprised.

“Twins?” Gabriel asked.

“Um. Closer,” Adrien said, resigned. His parents’ jaws dropped in unison. A small black head poked out from the pocket of Adrien’s winter jacket.

“I don't see what the big deal is,” Plagg said, looking up at Adrien. “Ever since you got married it's been ‘Oh, we want three kids’, three kids this, three kids that. Now you're having three kids. What's the problem?”

“We didn't think we’d be having them all at the _same time_ , Plagg,” Adrien said, annoyed, as he followed after his wife.

 

* * *

 

“Are you two excited to finally see your baby?” the nurse tech asked, her voice aggressively chipper, as she smeared the cold gel on Marinette's exposed stomach.

“Definitely,” Marinette said, as Adrien took her hand. Mostly, though, she was looking forward to not pretending she thought there was only one of them. It had made all her doctor’s appointments incredibly frustrating. She had a million questions about triplet pregnancies specifically, but when she'd tried asking one as a hypothetical her doctor had merely rattled off some statistics and assured her it was nearly impossible and not worth worrying about.

“I'm afraid we won't be finding out the gender just yet, a lot of new parents don't realize that.”

“Oh, that's fine,” Adrien said. “We don't care, as long as they're healthy.”

The tech frowned. “They?”

“Uh… Marinette and the baby.”

“Oh, of course. Well, I don't see why they wouldn't be, Marinette’s young and very healthy, and so far everything looks… hmm.”

“Something wrong?” Marinette asked.

“Oh, I'm… I'm not authorized to read it for you, the doctor should be in any-” The obstetrician entered the exam room just then and smiled at her patient as she joined her nurse.

“How are you feeling? Nervous? Good God, look at those abs, what on earth is your workout routine? All right, let's take a look.” The doctor took the ultrasound wand from her nurse and began to move it around, looking at the screen. “And… there's the heartbeat! Right there, see?”

“Oh,” Marinette gasped, her breath catching. She hadn't expected to be so moved by a simple pulsing spot on a screen. She grinned up at Adrien, who was beaming at the sight.

“Everything else looks perfectly… oh my.” The doctor paused for a moment. “You might want to sit down for this,” she said to Adrien, “but it looks like you two are having twins.”

Marinette and Adrien exchanged a glance. “Could you check again?” Adrien finally asked. The doctor smiled comfortingly.

“I know that sounds scary,” she said, “but medical science has come a long way in making these kinds of pregnancies as safe as possible, I promise.”

“Sure,” Marinette said, “but seriously, check again.”

“Here,” the doctor said, pointing. “There's the first heartbeat, and over here,” she shifted the wand, “is…” She blinked rapidly. “Um. Hmm. I, uh, I'm going to go get a colleague of mine, actually, just to double-check my reading, okay?”

 

* * *

 

“Agreste-Dupain-Cheng or Dupain-Cheng-Agreste?” Adrien asked one afternoon.

“Huh?” Marinette looked up from her fashion magazine. “Oh, I don't think we should hyphenate. It's bad enough with two names but three is just too much. They can have your last name.”

“Really?”

“Sure,” Marinette said. “I’m picking all their other names, so it's only fair.”

“Is that so?” Adrien asked, amused. He crossed to the couch and sat down next to her. “When were you going to mention this?”

“Actually, I did mean to run it by you, but…” Marinette put her magazine aside and looked her husband seriously. “I want to give them Chinese middle names. I know it's only a quarter of their heritage, but it's important to me that it's at least some part of their identity. And I know it'll make my mother overjoyed. What do you think?”

“I love it,” Adrien said, grinning. Marinette sighed in relief.

“Really?”

“Of course! Why wouldn't I? I teach Chinese for a living. Besides, anything to win me points with your mother is a good idea in my book.”

Marinette rolled her eyes, laughing. “As if you needed any help there,” she said. “My mother adores you. I don't try nearly as hard to impress yours, you know.”

“Yeah, well, we weren't all lucky enough to rescue our mother-in-laws from evil cults when we were teenagers, were we?”

“Good point,” Marinette said, kissing her husband’s cheek. “Maybe you do have some catching up to do after all.” She picked her magazine back up.

“What about their first names?”

“Oh, I picked those out when I was ten,” Marinette said. “Hugo, Louis and Emma. I didn't think I'd be using them all up at once, of course, but-”

“What if it's not two boys and a girl?”

Marinette scoffed. “What are the odds of _that_?” she asked teasingly.

“Um… two cubed is eight, eight minus three is five, five eighths is… sixty-two and a half percent?”

Marinette glared at her husband over the top of her magazine. “Show-off,” she muttered.

“Got any back-up names?”

“Nah,” Marinette said. “In the _extremely_ unlikely scenario that it's not two boys and a girl, I guess you’ll get to name one after all.”

 

* * *

 

“Is it too weird?” Jonathan asked out loud. “I mean, obviously it’s weird, but is it _too_ weird? Like, so weird that it completely cancels out how great it is to get free stuff? They want what’s on the registry, obviously, but maybe they also want to never hear from me again. Although it has been, what, fourteen years? Is that long enough that I can start sending my nephew things again? I don’t know, I sent Adrien a check when they got married, but that’s a lot less personal. And a lot less likely to trigger protective mama bear instincts, too. It’s not going to come off as _threatening_ , right? Because the more I think about it, the more I’m worried it has a distinct, like, ‘Eighth fairy showing up uninvited to Sleeping Beauty’s christening’ feel to it, you know?” Jonathan looked up from scrolling through the registry on his computer and raised an eyebrow. “Feel free to weigh in at any time,” he said wryly.

“Oh, I wouldn’t dream of it,” Ferd said lightly, from the other side of their living room. “I just want to sit and watch this moment unfold. You can’t appreciate it, because you’re inside of it, but it’s really something else. My supervillain boyfriend-”

“ _Ex_ -supervillain boyfriend-”

“-is agonizing over what to send his nemeses off their baby registry. It’s adorable, obviously, and hilarious, and weirdly transcendent and I wish I could just bottle it up and keep it with me forever for rainy days. But alas, all I can do is commit it to memory.”

“Why did I think you were going to be helpful about this?” Jonathan asked, turning back to the computer screen.

“Oh, just send them the most expensive thing on the list, querido.”

“I’m sure my sister’s already sent them everything that’s… hmm.” He stopped scrolling. “Actually, that might work.”

 

* * *

 

“Oh my God, it’s the triple-decker stroller,” Marinette said, stunned, after unwrapping the package that had been delivered. “The _really_ nice one, with the detachable car seats and-” she cut herself off with an excited squeal and started unpacking it.

“Wow, really?” Adrien asked, walking over. “Who sent it?”

“I assume it was your parents,” Marinette said, as Adrien bent down and picked up the card. “I don’t think anyone else we know would-”

“Um. No, not my parents,” Adrien said slowly.

“Really? Then who?”

“Um. Well, it looks like it was my uncle, actually.” Marinette froze, and then her eyebrow arched way, way up as she looked at her husband. “Do you, uh, want to return it?”

For a moment, Marinette looked like she was going to say ‘yes’, but then she looked back at the stroller and stared at it for a good minute. “Hell, no,” she finally said. “Hawkmoth can send us all the damn guilt strollers he wants. One less Thank You note for me to write.”

 

* * *

 

“They're asleep,” Gabriel complained, looking across the room as they came through the front door.

“They're babies, Gabriel,” his wife said patiently. “It's what they do. Hello, dear, you're looking well.”

“Adrien didn't sleep this much,” Gabriel insisted. “I don't think I've seen them awake once.”

“Adrien didn't come into the world six weeks early,” Marinette pointed out patiently. She started to get up from the couch. “Can I get either of you-”

“Sit _down_ , Marinette, you've had major surgery,” Adrien said as he entered the living room, exasperated. He crossed to the door and hugged his parents. “Hi Mom, hello Father. Here, I'll grab your coats. They should be up soon this time.” He took their coats and started across the room with them. “The doctor said _six weeks_ ,” he said to his wife as he passed.

“ _Up to_ six weeks,” Marinette corrected. “It's been over four, and I feel fine.” She rolled her eyes lovingly as Adele crossed to look at her grandchildren, asleep in their little rockers.

“Oh, they're so precious,” Adele gushed. “And-did you paint the girls’ fingernails?”

Marinette grinned. “It's a trick I read about online, for telling identicals apart. Not that either of us has any real difficulty, but just in case. Danielle is pink, Emma’s green.”

“Aww, that’s-” Adele caught sight of her third grandchild’s nails and stopped talking for a moment. “Why are Louis’ nails blue?”

“Oh, I can't claim any responsibility for that, that was all your son’s handiwork.”

“He felt left out!” Adrien said defensively, as he reentered the room. “I could see it in his eyes. What was I supposed to do? What kind of father would I have been if I _hadn't_ painted his nails?”

“That's a really good point,” Marinette said as he sat down next to her.

Suddenly, Adrien’s phone vibrated insistently. He slid it out of his pocket and glanced at the screen. His eyes widened for a moment. “I, uh, I'm gonna start another load of laundry,” he said, distracted.

“Oh, I'll do that, sweetheart,” Adele said. “We’re here to help, after all. Take a break.”

“Um… no, that’s, uh…” Adrien trailed off, not meeting anyone's eye line. Before he could blink, Marinette had snatched his phone from his grip and read the alert. “Hey!”

“A _bank robbery_?” Marinette asked, incredulous.

“I can handle it myself,” Adrien insisted.

“I know that, love, I'm just-a _bank robbery_? It's been decades since anyone tried that! Doesn't everyone know better by now, with Ladybug and Chat Noir protecting the city?”

“It’s only been Chat Noir for over half a year now,” Gabriel corrected matter-of-factly. “Perhaps the criminal element is feeling newly emboldened.” A dangerous look came into Marinette's eyes.

“Oh, it's like _that_ , is it?” she asked slowly. “God forbid Ladybug take a few months off to bring three new lives into the world, now everybody thinks they can get away with anything again? Well, time to nip _that_ in the bud.” She stood up, determined.

“Marinette, we agreed six weeks before-”

“Tikki, spots on!” Adrien groaned. “Ohhh,” Ladybug said slowly, holding her arms out and looking at her transformation, “I've missed this.” She grinned at her husband. “Well, I haven't been around to keep you sharp for a while, let's see if you can still keep up.” Without another word, she started running for the back door.

“Oh, I can keep up!” Adrien yelled after her, leaping to his feet. “Plagg, claws-oh, can you guys watch the babies? We should be back before their next bottle, but the schedule’s on the fridge just in case, everything’s set up already, the heating instructions are next to the schedule, thanks-claws out!” He ran after his wife. Adele and Gabriel exchanged a look in their son’s wake.

“For some reason, I have the distinct feeling that this will not be the last time that happens,” Gabriel finally said.


	11. Epilogue

At roughly three in the morning, Adele’s phone rang, waking her instantly.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, grabbing the phone off her nightstand and answering it in the dark.

“Nothing’s wrong,” she heard her son’s voice say soothingly. “Well-okay, something’s very wrong, but we’re all fine. There’s an… incident that needs our attention, that’s all. Marinette and I need to be in the Galapagos, like, yesterday. I’m really sorry to be calling this late, but can you watch the kids while we’re away?”

“Of course, darling,” Adele said, as she leaned over and roughly shook her husband awake.

“Great. We’re packing now, we should be there in twenty minutes, okay?”

 

* * *

 

Eighteen minutes later, Adrien and Marinette were standing outside the front door of the Agreste mansion. Marinette had Louis on one hip and Emma on the other. Adrien was holding Dani in one arm and lugging a giant suitcase behind him. All three toddlers were curled against their parents, eyes closed.

“Thanks, Adele,” Marinette said gratefully, as Adele scooped Emma out of her mother’s arm, and Gabriel took the suitcase from his son. “We told them they were visiting you, but I’m not sure how much they’ll remember when they wake up tomorrow.

“Hi, Grandma,” Emma whispered, half asleep.

“Hello, darling,” Adele whispered, kissing Emma’s forehead. “Let’s get you three to bed, okay?”

They brought the kids upstairs, to Adrien’s old room, which had mostly remained untouched since he’d moved out. The three children were laid next to each other on the large bed in the room. They fit, but just barely.

“This is not going to work as a long-term arrangement, is it?” Adele observed.

“We’ll buy separate beds for them and have them put up tomorrow,” Gabriel said.

“Oh, you don’t have to-” Adrien’s parents cut him off with a look in perfect unison. “I mean… thanks.”

The four of them made their way downstairs. “Call my parents at any time, if you need help,” Marinette told her in-laws. “I left them a message. I would have asked them to watch the kids directly, but it's a very busy time of the year at the bakery and-”

“Nonsense, of course the children should stay here,” Adele insisted. “We’ll love having them.”

“What are your plans?” Gabriel asked. “Are you leaving immediately?”

“There’s a flight in a few hours to Quito,” Adrien told him. “A short layover in Amsterdam. We should be there by this afternoon. Well, it'll be afternoon in Ecuador, anyway.” Adrien yawned.

“That sounds like a perfectly miserable way to travel,” his father said. “I'll make a call. The jet will be ready within the hour to fly you there directly, and you won't have to put up with all the ridiculous hassles of commercial travel.”

“At this hour?”

“Adrien, I have spent decades cultivating certain expectations. The people in my employ understand that I am a man who gets what he wants, when he wants it, regardless of cost or convenience. What is the _point_ of all that if I cannot summon a private jet to fly my son and his wife to South America at three in the morning?”

“But we couldn't ask you to-”

“Yes, we absolutely could,” Marinette interrupted. “We want to actually be functional when we arrive, and sleeping is _much_ easier on your father’s private plane. Thank you, Gabriel.” He nodded.

“Functional for what, exactly?” Adele asked, as her husband began dialing a number on his personal phone. Adrien and Marinette exchanged a glance.

“I suppose we’d better not say,” Marinette finally said apologetically.

“It shouldn't be too difficult to take care of,” Adrien said. “You might not hear from us for a few days, but we should be back before Saturday. If you still haven't heard from us by then-”

“If you haven't heard from us in a week, have fun raising three hellions,” Marinette muttered.

“That is a joke, Marinette is joking,” Adrien said quickly. “But, um… but seriously, if you don't hear from us in a week, call the Guardian.”

“Understood,” his mother replied.

 

* * *

 

After Adrien and Marinette left, being driven to the airport by one of Gabriel’s private drivers, Adele and Gabriel went back upstairs to check on the triplets. All three were out like lights, but even in sleep they had managed to draw closer to one another, on some instinctual level. Emma’s head was against Dani’s shoulder, and Dani’s hand was lightly grasping Louis’. Their breathing was soft, steady, and in sync.

“Look at them,” Adele whispered. “They look so peaceful. Couldn’t you just watch over them for hours like this?” Wordlessly, Gabriel put an arm around his wife’s shoulders in response. “Their parents are doing such an amazing job,” Adele continued.

“They are,” Gabriel agreed.

“I hope the kids aren’t too worried tomorrow, when they wake up and their parents are gone.”

“Well, they can't be as worried as I am,” Gabriel muttered. “I can't say I'm a fan of international superhero missions where this family is concerned.”

“They’ll be fine,” Adele said confidently. “They have each other.”

Gabriel sighed. “True,” he admitted. Adele smiled gently.

“It’s nice when the generation that comes after you learns from your mistakes, isn’t it?” she asked.

Gabriel kissed the top of Adele’s head. “It is.”

Years ago, for a very long time, it had seemed impossible to Adele that she could ever be happy again. And then she’d been rescued, against all the odds, but that hadn’t been enough either. It had been a hard journey, back to happiness. It had taken work, and so much time, but looking down on her grandchildren now it suddenly occurred to Adele that somewhere along the way, probably many years earlier, she’d finally achieved that happily ever after she’d once never dared to dream of having.

She was dead wrong, of course, but she could hardly be blamed for thinking it.

The truth was, there are no happily ever afters, no happy endings. There are no endings at all, in fact. There are simply good times and bad. Adele was in the middle of a particularly long stretch of good just now, but it wouldn’t last forever. And it would come to an end much sooner, and much more abruptly, than Adele could realize. But for now, well. Adele was happy. The people she loved were happy.

It wasn’t happily ever after, but it was close enough.


End file.
